音樂是我們共有的語言

音樂是我們共有的語言

Versions of the Tower of Babel origin myth exist in many cultures as a way to explain why we humans speak so many different languages around the globe. While there's still no common tongue to unite us all, there might, perhaps, be another way to communicate with our fellow Earthlings: music.

巴別塔起源神話的版本存在于許多文化中，用來解釋為什么我們?nèi)祟愒谌蛘f這么多不同的語言。當(dāng)我們還沒有共同的語言來團(tuán)結(jié)我們所有人的時候，也許有另一種方式來與我們地球上的同胞交流:音樂。

Music infuses our social lives, no matter where we are. (Photo: Maurizio De Mattei/Shutterstock.com)

Along with his colleagues, Samuel Mehr of Harvard University set out to discover if music really is universal across all languages. Harkening back to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1835 declaration that "music is the universal language of mankind," the team wanted hard evidence of this conventional wisdom.

哈佛大學(xué)的塞繆爾•梅爾和他的同事們開始探索音樂是否真的是所有語言的通用?；仡?835年亨利·沃茲沃斯·朗費(fèi)羅的宣言“音樂是人類的通用語言”，研究小組想要找到這種傳統(tǒng)智慧的確鑿證據(jù)。

Gathering the music of the world, both ancient and modern, both love songs and mournful ballads, was no small task.

收集古今中外的音樂，包括情歌和悲歌，是一項艱巨的任務(wù)。

For the past five years, Mehr and his team have been hunting down hundreds of recordings, from public libraries to obscure private collections. Their project, dubbed The Natural History of Song, is a database of almost 5,000 descriptions of songs and song performances from 60 human societies.

在過去的五年里，梅爾和他的團(tuán)隊一直在搜尋數(shù)以百計的錄音，從公共圖書館到鮮為人知的私人收藏。他們的項目名為“歌曲的自然歷史”，是一個包含近5000首歌曲描述和60個人類社會歌曲表演的數(shù)據(jù)庫。

"We are so used to being able to find any piece of music that we like on the internet," said Mehr, who is now a principal investigator at Harvard's Music Lab. "But there are thousands and thousands of recordings buried in archives that are not accessible online. We didn't know what we would find: at one point we found an odd-looking call number, asked a Harvard librarian for help, and twenty minutes later she wheeled out a cart of about 20 cases of reel-to-reel recordings of traditional Celtic music."

梅爾現(xiàn)在是哈佛大學(xué)音樂實驗室的首席研究員。“但有成千上萬的錄音被埋藏在檔案中，無法在網(wǎng)上找到。我們不知道會發(fā)現(xiàn)什么:有一次，我們發(fā)現(xiàn)了一個奇怪的電話號碼，于是向哈佛大學(xué)的圖書管理員求助，20分鐘后，她推出了一輛手推車，里面裝著大約20盒傳統(tǒng)凱爾特音樂唱片。”

Sing us a song

為我們唱首歌

An Australian brass band in 1906. (Photo: Unknown [public domain]/Wikimedia Commons)

This is the team's largest and most ambitious study to date, with the full results recently published in Science.

這是該團(tuán)隊迄今為止規(guī)模最大、最雄心勃勃的研究，其完整結(jié)果最近發(fā)表在《科學(xué)》雜志上。

The study was truly universal, with musicians, data scientists, psychologists, linguists and political scientists all participating in this international collaboration.

這項研究是真正全球性的，音樂家、數(shù)據(jù)科學(xué)家、心理學(xué)家、語言學(xué)家和政治科學(xué)家都參與了這項國際合作。

More than just music, the scientists drilled down, sorting the songs and song performances into 60 variables for easy cross-referencing. The variables included the demographics of singers and audience members; the presence of instruments and special costumes; the duration of the song; and the time of day. Keywords were also assigned to events leading up to a song performance, as well as its behavioral context, function and lyrics.

除了音樂，科學(xué)家們還深入研究，將歌曲和歌曲表演分成60個變量，以便相互參照。變量包括歌手和觀眾的人口統(tǒng)計數(shù)據(jù);樂器和特殊服裝的出現(xiàn);歌曲的持續(xù)時間;和一天的時間。關(guān)鍵詞也被分配到歌曲表演前的事件，以及它的行為背景、功能和歌詞。

A second database focused solely on four categories of songs: lullabies, love songs, healing songs and dance songs. Despite their differences, songs in each category shared underlying structural concepts, which could be considered the "grammar" or building blocks of music.

第二個數(shù)據(jù)庫只關(guān)注四類歌曲:搖籃曲、情歌、治愈歌曲和舞曲。盡管存在差異，但每個類別的歌曲都有共同的基本結(jié)構(gòu)概念，這些概念可以被認(rèn)為是音樂的“語法”或構(gòu)件。

"As a graduate student, I was working on studies of infant music perception and I started to see all these studies that made claims about music being universal," Mehr explains. "How is it that every paper on music starts out with this big claim but there's never a citation backing that up ... Now we can back that up."

梅爾解釋說:“作為一名研究生，我致力于研究嬰兒對音樂的感知，我開始看到所有這些聲稱音樂具有普遍性的研究。為什么每篇關(guān)于音樂的論文一開始都有這么大的聲明，但是從來沒有引文支持它……現(xiàn)在我們可以證明這一點了。”

Test your ears

測試你的耳朵

A screenshot of Harvard's Music Lab world music quiz. (Photo: Harvard Music Lab)

If you'd like to test your own musical acumen, the folks at Harvard's Music Lab have kindly put together some interactive quizzes for your listening pleasure (and that link takes a few seconds to build, so be patient). The world music quiz plays snippets of songs in one of the four aforementioned categories, then asks you to guess if the crooning is for a baby, a sickly person, a lover or those just wanting to dance.

如果你想測試自己的音樂才能，哈佛大學(xué)音樂實驗室的工作人員已經(jīng)為你的聽力樂趣整理了一些互動測試(鏈接需要幾秒鐘來建立，所以耐心點)。“世界音樂測試”會播放上述四類歌曲中的一種，然后讓你猜猜這首歌是為嬰兒、體弱多病的人、愛人還是只是想跳舞的人而唱。

From a lullaby sung by the Native American Hopi tribe to a dance song from the Maasai people of Tanzania to a healing song performed by a member of the Anggor people of Papua New Guinea, you might be surprised to see how many songs you can correctly categorize.

從美國土著霍皮人唱的搖籃曲，到坦桑尼亞馬賽人的舞曲，再到巴布亞新幾內(nèi)亞盎格魯人的治愈之歌，你可能會驚訝地發(fā)現(xiàn)你能正確地歸類多少首歌。

Mehr, who began his academic studies in music education, looks forward to further studies on "musical grammar," and breaking down age-old assumptions.

梅爾開始了他在音樂教育方面的學(xué)術(shù)研究，他期待著對“音樂語法”的進(jìn)一步研究，并打破古老的假設(shè)。

"In music theory, tonality is often assumed to be an invention of Western music, but our data raise the controversial possibility that this could be a universal feature of music," Mehr adds. "That raises pressing questions about structure that underlies music everywhere — and whether and how our minds are designed to make music."

“在音樂理論中，調(diào)性通常被認(rèn)為是西方音樂的發(fā)明，但我們的數(shù)據(jù)提出了有爭議的可能性，即這可能是音樂的一個普遍特征，”梅爾補(bǔ)充說。“這就提出了一個緊迫的問題，那就是音樂無處不在的結(jié)構(gòu)，以及我們的大腦是否以及如何被設(shè)計來創(chuàng)造音樂。”