"Aside from an inability to hold a tune, I get emotionally overwhelmed by close harmony singing. This has happened since childhood and is utterly inexplicable."

Penguin, perhaps this will hopefully help render the inexplicable utterly explicable.

So, I'm driving along my favourite road, everyone should have one BTW, to walk, bike or skip along, and this CBC science radio show, Quirks and Quarks, comes on and it's an interview with two astrophysicists.

Seems they were perplexed as to why this Black Hole, contrary to the laws of physics and event horizons, seemed to be emitting something.

So they asked their friends to aim their enormous radio telescopes at this offending Black Hole: I use Caps out of respect for this truly big thing.

The results were that indeed there was something emanating...and at the same frequency as B-Flat.

Now, B-Flat is really really important key to humans.

A lot of the woodwinds are in the key of B-Flat: clarinets, oboes and some saxophones and that's not even getting into the horns. And damn if Spielberg doesn't use our visceral connections to B-Flat to serve his cinegraphic purposes.

So after the radio segment concluded, I parked on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway, the Thompson River's blue water busy dissecting British Columbia's rain-shadow desert, and got out.

Breathed in the sage-scented air.

Why not the key of B?

Then I remembered. The human chakras. Each with a colour, and each with a note.

Essentially, as the mystics would have it, we are all walking prisms of refracted light. And the Crown Chakra, with its violet hues, the top and often the bottom of a rainbow, resonates to the Key of B.

And the crown chakra is the one most open, or friggin' well should be, to receive the energy of the universe: as above coming down below!

As I leaned against my hood, the cool ticking down of the engine the only musical accompaniment in earshot, I wondered aloud: why B-Flat and not just B, what's flat got to do with it!

A meadowlark trilled its virtuoso song of abandonment and love and then I remembered something about B-Flat.

According to many of the practitioners of tantric love, B-Flat is also the note of shared simultaneous orgasm. And that's a lot of endorphins and serotonin and oxytocin being released and churned about in the milk ocean.

That's right. One of the really really big things in the universe, this Black Hole, was emitting one of the most enormous aeons-long sustained 'ahhhhhs'...like ever.

But, you ask, what the hell does this have to do with close harmonic singing and your tears?

Well, thanks for asking.

So, the next time I was on the road, another interview came over the radio.

Synchronicity!

This time the interview dealt with two researchers who wanted to know if there were any other ways, other than through a close encounter of the best kind, that our amygdala triggers the hypothalamus to release oxytocin.

Turns out we release oxytocin when we sing.

And when we sing with others? We release even more.

Dear Penguin, when we sing in harmony?

Open the floodgates!

So when you sing in harmony, you are releasing a gallon of oxytocin and therefore, emotions can be at times dare I say overwhelming to the point of tears.

That's called I believe ecstasy or something darn near close to it.

And that brings me back to B-Flat.

One of the conclusions I reached after those two episodes, other than I need to be on the road way more often, is that here all this time, all these people were singing with each other at church, a cathedral, a cave, a sacred grove, all microcosmic reflections of the macrocosm, the Black Hole of course being a 'biggun', and then walking out feeling well, like you, in a state of near tear-staining awe.

Many thought the good vibrations were due to THE BIG GUY, or the Priest in the pulpit, or even the Choirmaster or the Organist.

But it wasn't them! It was us... prisms of refracted light singing with each other, in harmony, releasing buckets of eye-tingling oxytocin, enough to make that Black Hole hum out a perfect B-Flat along with us.

So I'd say that you've been gifted with an itchy harmonic trigger finger Dear Penguin, so sing away and tick all the boxes you can.