The World Science Festival, held in New York earlier this summer, has produced a couple of enjoyable videos that illustrate the power of music.
Here, Bobby McFerrin illustrates how deeply embedded the pentatonic scale is in the human mind and harnesses an audience’s instinctive awareness of it to generate a bit of a cappella music. His comment at the end about how audiences around the world seem to share this grasp of the pentatonic scale is particularly interesting.
But music reaches even further, occasionally binding disparate species. This video of a dancing cockatoo is a lot of fun, particularly the sight of a panel of distinguished neuroscientists getting up (or getting down) and dancing with the bird. One of the most touching parts of the movie The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill was a quiet moment when Mark Bittner was playing the blues and a bird called Mingus bobbed his head along with the music. This is similar, but bigger.
If you have time to view the entire “Avian Einsteins” panel discussion about avian and human brains and the links between language and movement, I highly recommend it.
My cockatiel used to love Michael Jackson. You should have seen him dance. What amazed me about the articles on this phenomenon was the way the scientists wondered IF birds could dance. If? Two seconds of watching a bird dance to music and the question is answered.
Wow, both great videos. Snowball seems to have his own particular style of dancing, as do each of the neuroscientists. That kind of movement comes from a place that cannot rightly be called “thinking”…I saw “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” and found the emotions of the parrots themselves very moving, as I’m sure most human viewers do, and I wonder why scientists spend so much time studying (animal) cognition and so-called “intelligence” rather than emotion or integrated feeling/thinking. The book _When Elephants Weep_ makes the case that scientific inquiry into animal emotions might be more interesting and relevant than any narrow search for animal intelligence, language ability, etc.