The Human Brain and Social Networking: Programming Musically

By Alan

Sometimes we have interesting things going on in our heads that we don’t understand, but have ways to tap into that unknown quality.

Take for instance this demonstration by Bobby McFerrin at the World Science Festival. He demonstrates that the brains in all humans (regardless of the cultural history or musical training), all have some built-in choral ability to recognize the Pentatonic Scale.

The Pentatonic scale (as opposed to the popular scale of most western civilizations heptatonic scale), is made up of 5 notes per octave. It’s famous for the scale of notes used in the famous communication scenes in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The movie postulates that it is the scale and note progressions were trained to humans by aliens. A recent performance by Moosebutter made fun of this note progression in a tribute to John Williams lipsync'd by Corey Vidal here.

Others consider that this was the original scale. The languages that existed before the Tower of Babel, when all mankind shared a common language. Still others figure it has some kind of spiritual undertones, but mortals don’t understand what those are.

Pentatonic scales are interesting, because given a crowd of individuals, asked to just create random notes in a groups, will nearly always end up harmonizing in the pentatonic scale.

The Celts of Scotland recognized this, and created an instrument to be heard across the valley, especially in times of war. The Great Highland Bagpipes are typically tuned to the pentatonic scale. This is also one of the reasons why “Amazing Grace”, scored in the pentatonic scale, plays so well on the bagpipes.  Literally, most other instruments fail to be tuned in such a way to make the hymn easy to play. [Also, the Highland bagpipes are capable of drowning out all other instruments, so the Great pipes are usually best heard outside, or use the softer Scottish Smallpipes for performances.]

Why talk about this under technology? Aside from the obvious link to Close Encounters, and the science fiction plot of alien influence, this has some relevance to the technology enabled concept of "Crowd Sourcing" where organizers use systems to get social groups to perform work for a final goal. Wikipedia, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, or even digg are all about using the collected "wisdom" of the crowd to get a better product. Many feel that we could be entering an era when super creative individuals are no longer the main driving force behind the advancement of civilization. Instead, it is advanced by small individual bits of semi-easy work done by thousands.

However, the very fact that individuals might hum in heptonic scales (major chords), but groups have tendencies towards pentatonic scales yields some interesting facts that socially generated music comes from a different part of the brain. This might mean that a body of creative work by an individual will not only be different than a creative work by a group, but the interaction of that group might have a fundamentally different base scale underlying the theme of the result.

James Surowiecki wrote a book a few years ago called "The Wisdom of Crowds."  In it, he tried to outline the kinds of crowd sourced projects that might work, and those that will not work.

There are places that crowd sourcing works well. It works when you have some sophisticated organizing system that breaks up the work into manageable parts, but is capable of reassembling them into usable results. It works when you can tap into diverse field of experts and let them weigh in with the inspired brilliance they can provide, and most importantly, that the interaction of the contributors is not influenced by the contributions of others.

So, you have the complication to be able to aggregate or total up all the data from the crowd, but you have to collate all the data without getting ht the benefit of collaboration between participants. Otherwise, your project will just end up with pentatonic results.

Comments

[Kevin M.]

Fascinating post! Very thought provoking!

[Alan]

Thanks. I've known about this phenomenon since teenage years in singing, but it was fun to realize that it's very appropriate to other areas of science or technology. It's kind of the Observer Effect multiplied all over.