The TED talk I chose for this assignment isn’t much of a talk - I’d classify it as an experiment with a statement. In the 3-minute clip,
renown musician Bobby McFerrin set out to prove a point about
expectations. He started by jumping in place while humming a note,
C#. Once the audience hummed along with him, he stepped to the side,
now humming D#. The audience now followed along as he jumped between C#
and D#. Bobby finished his jumps at F, a note that he hadn’t hummed up
until this point; the audience hummed it perfectly. He continued
jumping between notes, adding A# at the bottom, all the while singing
his own melody as the audience harmonized for him. Bobby finished his
presentation by stating that everyone subject to this experiment behaves
in the same manner.
The message Bobby McFerrin sent with his
experiment is that humans are hard-wired to collectively understand
music at its most primal. The scale used was a Pentatonic scale,
a scale containing five notes that serves as the framework for other
scales. It’s the kind of thing where we humans know what notes are the
core of a scale (at the very least on a subconscious level), and so when
asked to follow along in an experiment like Bobby’s, the notes just
come naturally. It’s very much possible that all humans have a
subconscious understanding of music; Joel Zimmerman (aka deadmau5),
known as the definitive EDM musician, stated in an interview
that although he has no formal music education, “I know what music
should sound like in my head, and I think that’s enough for me.”
That
being said, this subconscious understanding can be and has been
distorted beyond recognition by the current music industry. Not only is
it valuing cheap pop acts over legitimate musicality, but little effort
is being made to educate people on music. To prove my point: as I was
writing this blog post, I was listening to The Four Seasons on Spotify,
only to be constantly interrupted by commercials of mainstream hip-hop
and commercial pop. Fortunately, Bobby McFerrin’s experiment shines a
light of hope that maybe people still know what music is… even if it’s
on a subconscious level.
