In June, Bobby McFerrin was a panelist in at the World Science Festival. The panel explored whether our response to music is hard-wired or culturally determined. Here is a clip from the Festival where McFerrin gets the audience to improvise a song to demonstrate the universality of the pentatonic scale: https://vimeo.com/21536636
The whole conference can be seen at: http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/video/notes-neurons-full.
Thanks to David Pogue of the NYTimes for directing my attention to this.