In most melodies, one pitch within the octave has special significance -- the melody seems to gravitate to it and will often return to it at the end or other points of rest. This pitch is called the tonic and the feeling that the melody gravitates to this one pitch is called tonality. This is not to say that every piece has this quality of tonality (or, we would say, is tonal). Some composers have sought to evade this sense, creating atonal music.

Nor does every piece of music use every pitch within the tuning system all the time. More often, pitches in addition to the tonic are selected from a subset of the tuning system. When arranged step-wise starting from the tonic, this set is represented as a scale. Western music usually has seven notes per octave (the eight being the octave, of course) in a particular pattern you can see on the white keys of the piano. Depending on which one of these pitches one chooses as the tonic, a scale is created with a different pattern of intervals. The pattern created by this subset relative to the tonic is called a mode, and the two most common modes in Western music are those called major and minor.

Perhaps surprisingly, the pattern of the intervals in the mode give rise to very different emotional responses, depending on their use by the composer. The cliche that melodies in the major mode are happy and those in minor are sad has some truth to it, although a composer will use these impressions as a mere starting point to express many different emotions, many of which perhaps cannot be described verbally.

The following cue uses the major mode to evoke a celebratory and optimistic mood:

This cue changes a major mode melody into minor. The tragedy ironically recalls the association of the tune with optimism earlier in the film:

Film composers have on occasion used modes other than major or minor. Sometimes a composer will use such modes as a signal to indicate an exotic or distant time or place: Middle Eastern modes when the film is set there, Spanish modes for Spain, Chinese for China, medieval modes for a film set in those distant times, and so on.

On occasion a composer will also insert pitches outside of the mode. These pitches are called chromatic because they "color" the mode. Late Romantic composers such as those from the early days of film music used chromatic pitches to signal emotional intensity, striving, or intoxicating passion. However, taken to an extreme, one can imagine the case where it becomes difficult to tell which pitches are in the mode and which are not. Such chromatic music can eventually tend towards atonality.

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