A series of musical rising two-tone patterns comprising13 intervals, from unison to octave, is compared with two German nuclear contours, rise and rise-fall, both on utterances with upbeat-downbeat structure. The two-tone patterns are viewed as potential musical representations of the prosodic contours. However, because of rhythmic constraints they can only cover part of the prosodic contour information. Two ABX tests were carried out to examine whether the loss of contour information in the two-tone patterns is compensated for with other musical features. Results show that large and dissonant intervals are more likely assigned to the rise contour. Moreover, the rise is judged closer to the risings fifth (a I-V progression) and the rise-fall closer to the rising fourth (a V-I progression). This means that the relation between speech melody and musical melody includes aspects that are usually trieated as exclusively musical.