音乐是我们共有的语言

音乐是我们共有的语言

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.

巴别塔起源神话的版本存在于许多文化中，用来解释为什么我们人类在全球说这么多不同的语言。当我们还没有共同的语言来团结我们所有人的时候，也许有另一种方式来与我们地球上的同胞交流:音乐。

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.

哈佛大学的塞缪尔•梅尔和他的同事们开始探索音乐是否真的是所有语言的通用。回顾1835年亨利·沃兹沃斯·朗费罗的宣言“音乐是人类的通用语言”，研究小组想要找到这种传统智慧的确凿证据。

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

收集古今中外的音乐，包括情歌和悲歌，是一项艰巨的任务。

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.

在过去的五年里，梅尔和他的团队一直在搜寻数以百计的录音，从公共图书馆到鲜为人知的私人收藏。他们的项目名为“歌曲的自然历史”，是一个包含近5000首歌曲描述和60个人类社会歌曲表演的数据库。

"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."

梅尔现在是哈佛大学音乐实验室的首席研究员。“但有成千上万的录音被埋藏在档案中，无法在网上找到。我们不知道会发现什么:有一次，我们发现了一个奇怪的电话号码，于是向哈佛大学的图书管理员求助，20分钟后，她推出了一辆手推车，里面装着大约20盒传统凯尔特音乐唱片。”

Sing us a song

为我们唱首歌

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.

这是该团队迄今为止规模最大、最雄心勃勃的研究，其完整结果最近发表在《科学》杂志上。

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

这项研究是真正全球性的，音乐家、数据科学家、心理学家、语言学家和政治科学家都参与了这项国际合作。

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.

除了音乐，科学家们还深入研究，将歌曲和歌曲表演分成60个变量，以便相互参照。变量包括歌手和观众的人口统计数据;乐器和特殊服装的出现;歌曲的持续时间;和一天的时间。关键词也被分配到歌曲表演前的事件，以及它的行为背景、功能和歌词。

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.

第二个数据库只关注四类歌曲:摇篮曲、情歌、治愈歌曲和舞曲。尽管存在差异，但每个类别的歌曲都有共同的基本结构概念，这些概念可以被认为是音乐的“语法”或构件。

"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."

梅尔解释说:“作为一名研究生，我致力于研究婴儿对音乐的感知，我开始看到所有这些声称音乐具有普遍性的研究。为什么每篇关于音乐的论文一开始都有这么大的声明，但是从来没有引文支持它……现在我们可以证明这一点了。”

Test your ears

测试你的耳朵

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.

如果你想测试自己的音乐才能，哈佛大学音乐实验室的工作人员已经为你的听力乐趣整理了一些互动测试(链接需要几秒钟来建立，所以耐心点)。“世界音乐测试”会播放上述四类歌曲中的一种，然后让你猜猜这首歌是为婴儿、体弱多病的人、爱人还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.

从美国土著霍皮人唱的摇篮曲，到坦桑尼亚马赛人的舞曲，再到巴布亚新几内亚盎格鲁人的治愈之歌，你可能会惊讶地发现你能正确地归类多少首歌。

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

梅尔开始了他在音乐教育方面的学术研究，他期待着对“音乐语法”的进一步研究，并打破古老的假设。

"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."

“在音乐理论中，调性通常被认为是西方音乐的发明，但我们的数据提出了有争议的可能性，即这可能是音乐的一个普遍特征，”梅尔补充说。“这就提出了一个紧迫的问题，那就是音乐无处不在的结构，以及我们的大脑是否以及如何被设计来创造音乐。”