Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale
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Which if you think about it, Don't Worry Be Happy would have to be the most ironic possible song to cause a person to storm off.
I guess the audience kept mum on the requests, because my friend says it was one of the best shows he's ever been to. And he's been to a lot.
Note: coming from me, this is just heresay. I can't actually testify to Bobby McFerrin's hatred of Don't Worry Be Happy.
He wrote it in an hour or so because of being frustrated. I can imagine if you have 'great plans' and all people recognize you for is a thing that you whipped out like that it could get a little frustrating.
The real compliment is in that his musical genius is such that he could even do that.
There are other examples of that, I think that such huge popularity of a thing you whipped out in a short time causes people to think of you as a 'one hit wonder', and I'm sure that is not what Bobby McFerrin is all about.
It's a bit non-traditional, but one of my favorite classical CD's is where he sings the violin solos for various pieces. Link to album "Paper Music" is here:
For all the tracks marked "Voice", he's using his voice as a solo instrument, but not singing words. The description sounds cheesy, but the result is surprisingly effective -- simple and haunting.
He turns a crowd of unrelated people into a musical instrument in less than 60 seconds, most impressive.
If you watch, McFerrin gives the crowd 4 out of 5 pitches _first_. Assuming he starts on C, he gives them C-D-E, and then A. He also makes a point of making a bigger leap from C to A (a minor third) from between C-D-E (each a major second).
At that point, it's hard to see how the crowd could come up with anything _but_ a pentatonic scale! He's given them four notes, and established that a small jump is a major second and a big jump is a minor third. So when makes the big jump from E to G and the crowd follows along it's not all that magical.
If he'd just given them C-D-E and made a small step stage left, would they have gone for B or Bb instead?
It's still a fun little performance to watch, but I don't think it proves anything about the pentatonic scale being hardwired into the human brain.
Now, in this day and age, anybody who hasn't been raised by wolves has had the pentatonic scale drilled into them from the day they were born. Also, it's not an arbitrary bunch of notes. It's derived from simple harmonic principles.
Still, I would not have guessed that this stunt would be possible.
My understanding is that the same sorts of scales (logarithmic, with any frequency f and f*2^n treated as equivalent pitches, usually with five or eight tones per octave, occasionally more) have arisen independently in just about every human culture, usually without a mathematical theory. I could be wrong, though.
The irony of the pre-eminenct, western-only centered historical-musical view surrounding a McFerrin melody is thick as molasses. It's West African in rhythm, choral response, scale and spirit.
That's where the math came in to it.
That other German 'dude' J.S. Bach then proceeded to cover the new possibilities exhaustively, see the music in the volume of the same name. The enormous jump music made in the relatively short span of 15 years or so during which this all happened is still quite unbelievable.
It's him doing the same thing, but longer, and with more interesting soloing over it. This one's a proper piece.
It's a good example of a picky use of language that adds nothing whatsoever to the understanding of the subject.
"Interval" has connotations I didn't want, namely that it's the same no matter what degree of the scale you start on. I really did mean "I, III" specifically. As far as I know, there's no term in music for that, but "chord", namely a major I chord (only without the fifth) seems to fit what I wanted to say better than "interval" to me.
it's not anywhere close to a major I chord without the fifth!
never underestimate what other kinds of nerds you may encounter in the wild :]
I did not mean a major third interval. They could have sung the correct interval, but the wrong pitches. For what I did mean, I do insist that in the limited terminology of music, chord is a better fit because it implies the pitch where interval doesn't.
This necessitates terms like "Power Chord". Pedants are going to say this is wrong. (And oh yeah a Koala Bear isn't really a Bear either.) But it does get around a limitation of the language.
I would actually argue that interval actually is the most accurate term in this case. (Not that I didn't understand what was meant by the term "chord" though, and certainly wouldn't have been bothered by it)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyad_(music)
Of course, his instrument included a hundred or more voices, and several of them were on different octaves. So, I think one can say this was a "chord" by the general definition of "three or more notes from a key played simultaneously".
And, musicians do frequently refer to dyads as chords, as long as the third is there. The fifth has less harmonic weight (and never changes from major to minor) and the whole chord can be implied with just the first and the third. While pianists may mostly always have easy access to the fifth, stringed instrument players generally think of the fifth as the note you drop when you can't pick them all up.
In this case I don't think it was really a big deal either way. Discussion about the major 3rd in the video wasn't really harmed much, and a few mildly interesting posts about semantics resulted.
http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/962oj/bobby_mcferrin...
I don't want to say the word "crowdsourced," and yet, I just did.
And here we have a man who can play a crowd!
http://archive.deseretnews.com/archive/print/430672/AIR-BALL...
And then later dropped down the lower register.
(I'm guessing at the actual pitches; starting with C as a reference for the intervals.)