World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

At the World Science Festival in June here in New York, specialists – including musical specialist Bobby McFerrin – gathered to ask what in music we humans hear universally, versus what is culturally specific.

Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? Join host John Schaefer, Jamshed Barucha, scientist Daniel Levitin, Professor Lawrence Parsons and musical artist Bobby McFerrin for live performances and cross cultural demonstrations to illustrate music’s note-worthy interaction with the brain and our emotions.

You can watch a series of five video highlights, but the one above is perhaps the most striking. (I believe it’s already more than made the rounds around the Interwebs, but, well, we can say we were all busy creating digital music.)

Notes and Neurons videos

It’s funny just how low the average person’s opinion of their musical ability can be. Ask an average “non-musician,” and they’ll often claim to be deaf to rhythm and pitch. Push the issue, though, and typically you’ll discover quite the opposite. Listen as the crowd laughs at discovering they all share some basic intuition about how pitch works. These are, after all, science and neurology types, not musicians.