World Science Festival
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2016–2023
3:04 · 13M views · Jul 23, 2009
Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.
HN shares it as a delightful demo of the pentatonic scale's near-universal appeal and of a crowd syncing without instruction.
3 comments from Hacker News
Let's assume the thing is a flute. It's been reconstructed and plays beautifully. The odds of a hyena making such a thing with it's teeth are in silly territory, and we have other similar flutes that are nearly as old (relatively speaking). Given that, the fact that they made it using a scale so resonant with humans that it is still in very popular use sixty thousand years later - that's incredible. I felt the article drastically undersold the awesomeness of that, showing far too much restraint. Have you seen the video where Bobby McFerrin leads a whole crowd to sync perfectly with each other, without rehearsal, thanks to the pentatonic scale [0]? That's spiritual stuff ; it's 'sophisticated artistic expression'. That's the same scale that was (almost certainly) intentionally used to make this flute. 0 - this video
Some stuff based on pentatonic scales (blues) would probably make sense. From what I recall it's almost universal in different cultures. Bobby Mcferrin has a fun demo about this this video But yeah I bet some jazz would be baffling. I wonder how fast it'd take people to get into it. You could probably find some indigneous populations to work with.
> Also, this notation has a slight problem. That problem is that sheet music is terrible. > This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever. I hear it bandied around in these articles that music notation is awful. Can someone explain to me why? I'm not much of a musician, but I can work my way through sheet music if necessary, or write it when I want to. I don't remember what it was like to learn to read and write music so I'm not going to understand why it's so bad just by thinking about it. First of all, the lines and spaces make a ton of sense to me. When you're playing, reading, or writing a piece, you spend most of your time in a key with a diatonic scale. Maybe you're thinking about the chords: I, vi, ii, V7. The lines and spaces are great for giving you that kind of information. I guess this "completely obscures the relationship between the pitches". I guess that's the case if you forget what key you're playing in. The alternative would be to make the staff fully chromatic, but that sounds like it has a bunch of disadvantages for most music. The chromatic staff ( [LINK] ) looks terrible to me, since it spreads out the notes farther. I've already memorized all of the diatonic scales, and now the diatonic scales are jumping around, and the staff covers a shorter interval so you get more of those 8va or 15ma. Hummingbird ( [LINK] ) seems like classical notation, just with more redundancy and the symbols changed around a little bit. Maybe it's b