watching Bobby McFerrin

I had a brief moment where I broke down and cried last night. Maybe I have to turn in my man card for confessing that, but that's the unvarnished truth.

I had been emailing and texting back and forth with my brother Sean, the professional cellist, who is on the cusp of moving away from the DC area and to the Chicago suburbs (into what appears to be, according to the real-estate listing, a huge, palatial "ranch"-style house with plenty of interior space, a sun's worth of natural light, four bedrooms, and 2.5 bathrooms). I had emailed Sean a link to a Joe Scott video about the power of music. Scott's video mentioned an old video clip that I had seen years before: the clip was of Bobby McFerrin at a neuroscience conference, demonstrating—with the help of the audience—the instinctive and pancultural nature of the pentatonic scale.

McFerrin framed his demonstration by evoking the concept of "expectations," and he showed what he meant by first singing two or three notes on the pentatonic scale while hopping from spot to spot on the stage as a way of visually representing those notes. McFerrin encouraged the audience to sing the notes he had presented to the audience, and once he got the audience singing a simple tune, he then hopped a bit farther than he had hopped before, i.e., to a spot on the stage representing a note he had not yet taught—and the audience gamely sang the note anyway.

The audience instantly realized something incredible had just happened, and McFerrin paused long enough for the audience to laugh at itself and applaud this discovery: it was an expectation, perhaps wired into the human brain, that if you progress in a certain direction on a pentatonic scale, you'll intuitively know what the next note is.

Now armed with this knowledge, the audience was ready for what McFerrin did next: he hopped back and forth along an imaginary piano keyboard, humming a melody that wove in and through the now-complex sequence of notes the audience was singing in time with his hopping. Incredibly, McFerrin took the audience far up and far down the scale—farther than any of the notes McFerrin had taught his listeners... and there was no problem. Everyone understood, without further prompting, which note to sing.

Here's what I emailed Sean after I had found the video clip on YouTube and rewatched it:

By the way, I found a clip-sized video of Bobby McFerrin's appearance at that neuroscience conference. His entire audience-enhanced performance is on the video. God help me, I actually cried while watching it just now. That caught me by surprise... I wasn't expecting to be moved by the mere rewatching of a short segment I'd seen years ago. But McFerrin's demonstration is such a simple, beautiful, joyful moment of human communion. We could all probably use a bit more of that these days.

I've been angry rather a lot on this blog of late, and I realize I may be contributing to a growing problem rather than helping to solve it. It was good to be reminded that there's always, always more to this world than just anger. There is also beauty, and sometimes that beauty catches us unawares. Here's the brief video that I found and watched last night:


Maybe that clip won't touch you the way it affected me, but I hope it at least puts a smile on your face and makes your day just a little bit better.