Bobby McFerrin and Our Subconscious Understanding of Music

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.