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You might not realize it, but chances are pretty good that a melody is running through your mind right now. It may be something that you heard yesterday on the radio, it might be music that you downloaded from the Internet, it might be a catchy jingle from a television ad, or it might even be something that you composed yourself. As soon as you start humming, singing, or whistling, you are performing a melody. Melodies do more than just pass through our minds, though -- they affect our entire bodies, causing us to tap our toes or move and dance without consciously thinking about it.

Technically speaking, melody is a group of notes that are played one at a time to a specific rhythm. These notes form a unit that we can recognize and remember. The melody is the part of the music that stands out as most important. It's what sticks in our minds once the music is over.

A melody is the musical equivalent of a sentence -- it expresses a complete idea and it can be broken down into phrases. Sometimes these phrases sound like musical versions of questions with answers. The beginning of the melody may stop at a point without really sounding like it is finished. This phrase may sound like a question, or in musical terms an antecedent. The phrase that answers that question is called the consequent. The point of rest at the end of a phrase is called the cadence.

The smallest units of a melody are its notes or pitches. Pitch is the highness or lowness of a sound and its scientific term is frequency. Whenever we hear a sound we actually perceive vibrations of airwaves. Those airwaves can be measured in vibrations per second that we call frequency -- the faster the vibrations, the higher the pitch. Most humans can hear a range of 20 vibrations per second to 20,000 vibrations per second.

Every melody has a tonality. The tonality is like a gravitational force in music. It draws our ears to one central pitch or...