THE VIDEO SHELF · pentatonic scale
Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale | World Science Festival
Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN shares it as a delightful demo of the pentatonic scale's near-universal appeal and of a crowd syncing without instruction.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- World Science Festival
- Topic
- pentatonic scale
- Format
- demo
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 3
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2016–2023
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
Let's assume the thing is a flute. It's been reconstructed and plays beautifully. The odds of a hyena making such a thing with it's teeth are in silly territory, and we have other similar flutes that are nearly as old (relatively speaking). Given that, the …
mandmandam on Hacker News · 2023-05
In Neanderthal flute: The oldest musical instrument in the worldSome stuff based on pentatonic scales (blues) would probably make sense. From what I recall it's almost universal in different cultures. Bobby Mcferrin has a fun demo about this [VIDEO] But yeah I bet some jazz would be baffling. I wonder how fast it'd take …
rrmm on Hacker News · 2020-06
In What Did Bach Sound Like to Bach?
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.