Musicians have an advantage in vocal emotion perception compared to non-musicians. However, the mechanisms underlying this advantage are poorly understood. Although initial evidence suggests that acoustic sensitivity towards emotional voice cues plays an important role, it is unclear how musicians use these cues to perceive vocal emotions and how this might differ from non-musicians. To address this, we presented vocal stimuli manipulated via parameter-specific voice morphing (Tandem-STRAIGHT) that conveyed happiness, fear, pleasure, or sadness, either in all acoustic cues, or selectively in either pitch contour (i.e., voice melody) or timbre (i.e., voice quality) only. We then compared vocal emotion perception performance between two groups of professional/semi-professional musicians (N = 39) and non-musicians (N = 38). In line with previous findings, musicians outperformed non-musicians. This advantage was seen in the full and pitch-modulated conditions, but was absent in the timbre-modulated condition. Thus, musicians excel at perceiving the melody, but not the timbre of vocal emotions. Further correlational analysis revealed a link between acoustic sensitivity towards melodies and vocal emotional skills that even persists in the absence of any musical training, suggesting a predisposition in individuals to exploit melodic patterns in both music and voices. Together, these findings suggest that musicians are particularly tuned to the melody of vocal emotions, and that this may in part be due to a natural sensitivity towards melodic patterns.