Music Is Universal

音乐无国界

 

When you think of the songs of a faraway land or culture, what comes to mind? Is it something familiar, or something so unique from what you’re used to that you can barely guess what the music is about?

 

当你想到远方某地或某种文化的歌曲，脑海里浮现的是什么？是熟悉的，还是完全不同于你习惯的、令你费解难猜的独特曲调？

 

Turns out, your guess might be more educated than you think. Across cultures, we write different songs for different purposes, say, to start a religious procession, get your groove on, or hush a crying baby to sleep. But in the end, there’s more diversity within cultures than outside of them.

 

事实证明，你猜测的可能比你以为的更有音乐修养。遍览各种文化，我们出于不同的目的写不同的歌，比如，为了开始宗教游行、让你欢快地起舞，或者让啼哭的婴儿安静下来入睡。不过归根结底，文化内部的差异性比文化之外有过之而无不及。

 

A new study published in Science breaks down how the purpose of music is universal across the world, despite the incredible variety within each cultural bubble.

 

《科学》周刊上发表的一项新的研究结果分析了音乐的目的如何通行于世界各地，尽管它在各个文化内部存在着令人难以置信的多样性。

 

“Cultures all over the world have different kinds of music in each society, but what this means is when you zoom out, society’s musical behaviors are pretty similar,” says lead author Sam Mehr, a psychologist at Harvard.

 

哈佛大学心理学家、论文第一作者萨姆·梅尔说：“世界各地的文化都有每个社会所使用的不同类型音乐，不过这意味着当你放眼全局时会发现，社会的音乐行为十分相似。”

 

Mehr started working on the project after he kept reading a trite line at the top of research papers that said, “music is universal.” But every time he came across the statement, there wasn’t a citation to back it up.

 

梅尔开始致力于这项工作的起因是，他在科研论文的开篇总是读到这样一句老生常谈：“音乐无国界。”可是每次他碰到这种表述，它都没有用来支撑的引证。

 

To see if there was any substance to this claim, he and his fellow researchers created two databases: one with descriptions from anthropologists of what happened when music from 60 was playing, and another of 118 audio recordings from 86 different societies.

 

为了弄清这种说法是否有实质意义，他和其他研究人员创建了两个数据库：一个数据库里有人类学家对播放来自60个地方的音乐时所出现情况的描述，另一个则是来自86个不同社会的118段录音。

 

He found that there were three characteristics of behavior that consistently characterized music: formality, arousal (or how calming or exciting a song was), and religiosity. Most societies had music that fell into more than one category.

 

他发现，音乐始终有三种行为特征：礼节性、情绪的唤起（或者说歌曲能起到多少让人平静或令人兴奋的作用）和对宗教的虔诚。大多数社会拥有不只属于一类的音乐。

 

Given those categories, both machines and foreign listeners were able to pick out a song’s purpose in further tests. The researchers investigated responses from community scientists across the globe, looking at how well they could identify the type of tune based on samples from an online quiz.

 

了解到这些分类后，机器和外国听众都能在进一步测试中分辨出歌曲的目的。研究人员调查了全球各地研究社会群体的科学家的反应，看看他们可以在多大程度上依据在线测试样本确定曲调类型。

 

People did a decent job guessing the themes, especially for dance songs and lullabies, says author Manvir Singh, a Harvard Ph.D. student in the department of human evolutionary biology. “Music appears in this huge diversity of behavioral, social, emotional context in human societies,” Singh says, “but it does so similarly across societies.”

 

哈佛大学人类进化生物学博士研究生、论文作者曼维尔·辛格说，人们在猜测音乐主题方面表现得相当出色，尤其是在辨别舞曲和摇篮曲时。辛格说：“音乐在人类社会如此纷繁多样的行为、社会和情感背景下出现，但它在各个社会所扮演的角色极为相似。”

 

Daniel Levitin, a cognitive scientist who’s done similar research on music and evolution, believes this kind of systematic approach to understanding music is long overdue. He also says that the study points to an evolutionary history between music and humans.

 

一直在音乐和进化领域开展类似研究的认知科学家丹尼尔·列维京认为，早就该用这种系统性方法来理解音乐了。他还说，这项研究表明音乐和人类有着共同的进化史。

 

“The musical brain may have led to things that we take for granted in human nature, like compassion and empathy, because music uniquely can help us achieve those states,” Levitan explains. “Not to mention awe, appreciation, and gratitude.”

 

列维京解释说：“音乐头脑可能带来了人性中我们视为理所当然的一些东西，比如同情与共情，因为音乐可以很好地让我们达到这些状态。敬畏、欣赏和感激就更不用说了。”

 

For Mehr and his team, the hunt for data is just the beginning. The lab is running more detailed quizzes to dig into how people respond to what they hear. They also hope to do studies on different populations like infants to see how they react to tunes like lullabies from faraway societies.

 

对梅尔和他的团队来说，搜寻数据只是个开始。实验室正在开展更为详尽的测试，以便挖掘人们对自己听到的东西有何反应。他们还想对婴儿等不同人群展开研究，了解他们对来自远方社会的摇篮曲等曲调作何反应。

 

Singh says he also hopes to analyze lyrics and the way they shape people’s feelings and actions, even if it’s in a language they don’t understand. “Exploring the lyrics allows us to better understand how music can induce these emotional or behavioral responses,” says Singh, “but also, in a broader way, the world view of the people who are singing.”

 

辛格说，他还想分析歌词以及它如何影响人们的感受与行为，哪怕使用的是人们听不懂的语言。辛格说：“深入研究歌词让我们更好地理解音乐如何带来这些情感或行为反应，并且从更广阔的意义上讲更好地了解歌唱者的世界观。”

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