by Vijith

Revered jazz vocalist Bobby McFerrin‘s bizarre hopping here has such a remarkable effect on the audience that I had to double-check and was shocked to learn that it in fact was not part of a TED presentation. In brief: he teaches them two notes and implies that each has a connection to his physical location, then bounces back and forth as the audience sings. Suddenly they learn another — in unison, in sync, and more or less in tune, relatively speaking — when he hops to a new unexplained third location. Pretty soon he’s dancing all the way across a two-octave pentatonic scale. It’s not at all surprising to me to hear McFerrin say that he’s able to pull off this little parlor trick all across the globe — most forms of traditional folk music, even many of the ostensibly microtonal ones, use the pentatonic scale as an underlying skeleton, since note frequencies can only mathematically harmonize in a few different ways — but if you’re eager to hear the rest of the abruptly chopped answer University of Sheffield professor Lawrence Parsons gives to that “What the hell just happened here?” at the end, you better say goodbye to your lunch hour today.