World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
I hate to be a malcontent, especially given that this is ostensibly a marketing blog, but this sort of thing is about a million times more interesting than the marketing drivel that gets posted to the web every day. I honestly couldn’t care a whole lot less about most of the thinly guised “Self-Help for Social Networks” that I see with increasing frequency, and I don’t think I could care much more about the science behind what’s going on in this video. Humans have some interesting pre-installed software in their heads.
Via Jason Oke.
3 Comments
Just found a ton of interesting comments on the video page, especially from those more musically inclined than me. Their supposition is that the power isn’t at all in the pentatonic scale, but rather in the specific musical context in which the audience was raised. For instance, if you went elsewhere in the world, where music didn’t tend to follow major thirds, you’d hear a different scale from the audience. Interesting.
I’ve seen this thing come through a number of blogs/aggregators and I watched it last week. Color me unimpressed.
Don, I miss you.