As long-time readers know, I’m an amateur musician, from a very musical family. My sister is a music teacher, and my brother used to be a professional french horn player and composer. I personally play classical clarinet, a very wide range of folk-flutes, and some bluegrass banjo.<\/p>\n
As long as I’ve studied music, my teachers have always talked about how fundamental the pentatonic scale is. For those who don’t know, the pentatonic
\nscale is a basic scale which has five distinct notes per octave, instead of the 7 of the traditional diatonic scale, or the 12 of the chromatic scale. For example, the
\npentatonic scale starting at C is the notes C, D, E, G, A, and back to C.<\/p>\n
I’ve never really grasped what’s so fundamental<\/em> about it. It’s This video shows just how fundamental it is. Without being told to, people will World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale<\/a> from World Science Festival<\/a> on Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As long-time readers know, I’m an amateur musician, from a very musical family. My sister is a music teacher, and my brother used to be a professional french horn player and composer. I personally play classical clarinet, a very wide range of folk-flutes, and some bluegrass banjo. As long as I’ve studied music, my teachers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-cO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ngot a beautiful sound – but just looking at it, it’s hard to see what makes it more
\nfundamental than any other scale. It’s not an evenly distributed scale – the
\nsteps are second, second, minor third, second, minor third. But there’s something
\nabout it.<\/p>\n
\nnaturally sing the steps of the pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale is wired into our brains. Watch and be amazed! <\/p>\n