单词和旋律在大脑的不同部位被解码

单词和旋律在大脑的不同部位被解码

Listening to songs is a common activity, yet it relies on our brain’s ability to carry out the difficult task of processing both speech and music at the same time. A new piece of research studied how our brain manages to do this, and it turns out we have different sides of our brain to thank for distinguishing between the words and melodies in songs.

听音乐是一种常见的活动，但它依赖于我们的大脑同时处理语音和音乐这一艰巨任务的能力。一项新的研究研究了我们的大脑是如何做到这一点的，结果表明，我们大脑的不同部分负责区分歌曲中的单词和旋律。

Katy Pallister

Inspired by a songbird’s ability to separate sounds using two measures (time and frequency), Robert Zatorre, a professor at McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute and co-author of the study published in Science, told NPR they wanted to see if the same happened in humans.

麦吉尔大学蒙特利尔神经学研究所的教授、《科学》杂志上发表的这项研究的合著者罗伯特·扎托尔(Robert Zatorre)告诉美国国家公共电台(NPR)，他们想看看同样的情况是否也发生在人类身上。

To do so, they first enlisted the help of a composer and a soprano. They helped to create 100 unique a cappella songs from 10 sentences each sung in 10 original melodies, only a few seconds long. Then the researchers had some fun. They altered the timing and frequency patterns of some of the recordings before asking 49 participants whether the melody and words were either the same or different in pairs of tunes.

为此，他们首先找了一位作曲家和一位女高音的帮助。他们帮助创作了100首独特的无伴奏合唱歌曲，每首歌由10个句子组成，每个句子用10个原创旋律演唱，时长只有几秒钟。然后研究人员找了些乐子。他们改变了一些录音的时间和频率模式，然后询问49名参与者，在两组曲调中，旋律和歌词是相同的还是不同的。

The researchers found that when timings were changed, participants could no longer understand the lyrics, but could still recognize the melody. On the other hand when the frequencies in the song had been distorted, the lyrics were still recognizable but the melodies no longer were.

研究人员发现，当时间改变时，参与者不再能理解歌词，但仍能识别旋律。另一方面，当歌曲的频率被扭曲时，歌词仍然可以识别，但旋律不再可以识别。

At the same time that the participants were played the songs, their brains were also being scanned using functional MRI. The results showed that different sides of the brain were more heavily involved in the decoding of each element. Speech content was primarily processed in the left auditory cortex, whilst the melodic part was handled primarily in the right.

在播放歌曲的同时，研究人员还对参与者的大脑进行了功能性核磁共振成像扫描。结果显示，大脑的不同部位对每个元素的解码都有更大的参与。语言内容主要在左听觉皮层处理，而旋律部分主要在右听觉皮层处理。

The idea that the left and right brain respond to speech and music differently is not unknown. Speaking to NPR, Daniela Sammler, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Cognition and Neurosciences in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved in the study, explained that “If you have a stroke in the left hemisphere you are much more likely to have a language impairment than if you have a stroke in the right hemisphere." Other studies also show that brain damage to parts of the right hemisphere can impact a person’s ability to perceive music.

左脑和右脑对语言和音乐的反应不同，这一观点并非无人知晓。研究员NPR,丹妮拉的《赛姆勒莱比锡马普研究所认知和神经科学,德国,他并没有参与这项研究,解释说,“如果你在左半球中风更可能有一个语言障碍比右半球的如果你有中风。”其他研究也表明，大脑右半球部分的损伤会影响一个人感知音乐的能力。

The study contributes to our existing knowledge about why this specialization exists, and it's down to the type of acoustical information (in this case timing and frequency patterns) contained in the source’s soundwave.

这项研究有助于我们现有的知识，为什么这种专业化的存在，它的类型声学信息(在这种情况下的时间和频率模式)包含在源的声波。

Whilst this study did use sentences in both French and English, in the future the team would like to use more melodic languages, such as Thai and Mandarin, to see how this may affect the results.

虽然这项研究确实使用了法语和英语的句子，但在未来，研究小组希望使用更多的旋律语言，如泰国语和普通话，看看这可能会如何影响结果。