Ba Ba Ba Baaaaaa.

July 2, 2012 8:13 AM

Bobby McFerin Hacks Your Brain With Music [3 min vid].
posted by Phire (8 comments total)

He's been doing this for years. It's a cool trick, which demonstrates that music is order. And that the order is in us, rather than the music.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:21 AM on July 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

I love that it has always transcended language...doesn't matter where he goes in the world, his audience follows.
posted by squasha at 8:23 AM on July 2, 2012

Pentatonic scales make sense for simple musical forms, and have become nearly universally understood, probably because of the "rule" saying that seven plus or minus two is the amount of discrete "things" we can hold in working memory at one time. Seven minus two gives us the simple pentatonic scale, and seven of course is the standard Western chromatic scale. Tonality, which relates tones and harmonies to each other, facilitates"chunking" which makes it possible to hold greater amounts of material in working memory at one time. This also demonstrates why the 12-tone row as a new unit of musical organization was doomed to failure from a cognitive standpoint: if all the tones are truly non-hierarchical, it is impossible to hold a complete tone row in working memory.
posted by slkinsey at 8:36 AM on July 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

It's cool the way he uses the space to model the differences in frequencies. Something in our brains wants to relate a 3rd as being in between a tonic and a 5th, whether above and below, or along a line, even with the vocal cords, which you can't see, making the sounds. It's no mistake the first music theory consisted of proportions cut along a string.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:36 AM on July 2, 2012

He's been doing this for years.

Yeah, he totally killed with that number at Divje Babe in 41000 BC!
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 8:40 AM on July 2, 2012

It reminds me of that giant piano scene in Big (with Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia), but instead of a giant piano, Bobby McFerrin is using the vocal cords of hundreds of people.
posted by JiffyQ at 8:43 AM on July 2, 2012

This has to be at least a double. No?
posted by Decani at 8:43 AM on July 2, 2012 [3 favorites]

Yes. And a deleted double.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:52 AM on July 2, 2012 [1 favorite]