Around session four or five of the compassion training, I would often show the video below. It still moves me every single time. It is about sound and expectation—but for me it is above all about connectedness and our shared humanity, a central theme in compassion training.
In the video, Bobby McFerrin gives a whole new dimension to the phrase ‘playing the audience’… 😄 Watch and join in:
You can look at it, as usual, from multiple angles. The neurological perspective is fascinating: which neurons fire, and which brain regions are active? Interesting as that is, it is not what matters most to me. I do not feel neurons firing. I notice nothing of the activity apparently taking place in my brain.
What I do notice is this: hearing the melody brings with it a kind of recognition. It stays with you. When I show the video to people I know, they too often recognize the little tune as something like a primal melody. And what also strikes me: there is not a single wrong note. It works perfectly the first time, and it sounds relaxed.
The pentatonic scale: music everyone already knows
What McFerrin uses is the pentatonic scale: a scale with just five notes (penta = 5). That sounds simple, and in a way it is. But that simplicity is precisely its strength.
The pentatonic scale contains no so-called ‘tension’ intervals—the semitone steps that in Western music create tension and rest. As a result, pentatonic music sounds open, harmonious, and calming. There is essentially no wrong note: any combination of the five tones sounds good. Musicians sometimes call it a ‘safe’ scale.
And what is remarkable is that this scale appears in virtually every culture on earth, independently of one another. From the Scottish Highlands to Chinese classical music, from West African sounds to the blues, from Andean music to Japanese folk songs—the pentatonic scale is everywhere.
A universal musical language
How can a scale be so universal? Music scientists and cognitive researchers suggest that one possible explanation is that the pentatonic scale closely aligns with the natural overtone series—the acoustic structure that arises whenever a tone sounds. Our ears and brains are naturally sensitive to these proportions. The pentatonic scale ‘fits’, as it were, the way we humans perceive sound1.
This may also explain why children around the world spontaneously sing pentatonic melodies when they play. It is not a learned structure, but something that arises naturally. Neuropsychologist Stefan Koelsch describes it as a ‘biological priming’ for certain musical patterns—a kind of factory setting.
McFerrin demonstrates this brilliantly in his experiment. He gives the audience one note, then two, then moves to a third spot on the stage. The audience sings the next note—one they have never heard—immediately and perfectly. Not just this audience: he has done this experiment all over the world, and it always works: “Every audience gets this.”
Indigenous peoples and the power of shared sound
Anyone who listens to the music of indigenous peoples will notice something: music there is rarely an individual affair. Among the San people of the Kalahari, healing rituals are sometimes collective singing and dancing sessions lasting many hours. For Aboriginal Australians, the ‘songline’ connects generations and landscapes. In the Andes, making music and singing together is an everyday social activity.
In all these traditions, music serves a function that goes beyond entertainment: it regulates the group. It brings people into a state of shared presence. Music as social glue, as a medium for co-regulation.
It is striking that many of these traditions make use of—you guessed it—pentatonic or similarly simple tonal structures. I do not believe this is because they could not make more complex music, but rather because these sounds touch something deeper, something that does not need to be learned.
A polyvagal perspective: safety is something you can hear
Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory offers an interesting lens through which to understand this. Our nervous system is—so the theory holds—constantly scanning for signals of safety or danger. It does this not only through sight or smell, but also through sound. Porges calls this neuroception: an unconscious scanning of the environment. Indeed, sound (‘acoustic stimuli’) appears to be of great importance for safe neuroception.
As social mammals, we are specifically sensitive to vocal signals within a particular frequency range—the range of the human voice, of what is called prosodic, melodic communication. When our nervous system picks up such sounds, it interprets them as a signal of safety. The ventral vagal system—the system that enables social connection and relaxation—comes online.
Pentatonic music fits remarkably well into this picture. The gentle, harmonious intervals, the absence of sharp dissonances, and the rhythmic and melodic character—these are precisely the features that our nervous system recognizes as ‘safe’.
And there is more. When people make music together—and especially when they sing together—not only do their voices synchronize, but also their physiology. Heart rate, breathing, and even autonomic activation move towards alignment. Co-regulation through sound. Exactly what you hear happening in that hall with McFerrin: an entire audience, without any rehearsal, creating something beautiful together and audibly enjoying it.
More than 99.99% the same
We are genetically 99.99% identical to one another. We all have a brain that works in more or less the same way. And we have, as McFerrin’s experiment suggests, perhaps also a shared musical intuition that transcends culture, language, and time.
That is a beautiful thought, and it touches on something fundamental: music is not a luxury, not a side matter. It is one of the oldest and most powerful means people have to relate to one another, to regulate together, and to signal and receive safety.
Perhaps we underestimate the importance of music for our well-being—in education, in healthcare, and in our daily lives. While the answer turns out to be simpler than we might think: five notes, a hall full of strangers, and the recognition that, deep down, we are all the same.
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A beautiful quote from Leonard Bernstein: “The universality of this scale is so well known that I’m sure you could give me examples of it from all corners of the earth—from Scotland, from China, from Africa, from American Indian cultures, from East Indian cultures, from Central and South America, Australia, Finland... that is a true musico-linguistic universal.”