雅思阅读第028套3-Music:Language We All Speak
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3below.
Music: Language We All Speak
Section A
Music is one of the humanspecies' relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training, anyindividual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability torecognise music and, in some fashion, to make it. Why this should be so is amystery. After all, music isn't necessary for getting through the day, and ifit aids in reproduction, it does so only in highly indirect ways. Language, bycontrast, is also everywhere - but for reasons that are more obvious. Withlanguage, you and the members of your tribe can organise a migration acrossAfrica, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even whenyou can't see each other. Modern culture, in all its technologicalextravagance, springs directly from the human talent for manipulating symbolsand syntax.
Scientists have always beenintrigued by the connection between music and language. Yet over the years,words and melody have acquired a vastly different status in the lab and theseminar room. While language has long been considered essential to unlockingthe mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as anevolutionary frippery - mere "auditory cheesecake", as the Harvardcognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it.
Section B
But thanks to a decade-longwave of neuroscience research, that tune is changing. A flurry of recentpublications suggests that language and music may equally be able to tell uswho we are and where we're from - not just emotionally, but biologically. InJuly, the journal Nature Neuroscience devoted a special issue to the topic. Andin an article in the 6 August issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, DavidSchwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke University argued that thesounds of music and the sounds of language are intricately connected.
To grasp the originality ofthis idea, it's necessary to realise two things about how music hastraditionally been understood. First, musicologists have long emphasised thatwhile each culture stamps a special identity onto its music, music itself hassome universal qualities. For example, in virtually all cultures, sound isdivided into some or all of the 12 intervals that make up the chromatic scale-that is, the scale represented by the keys on a piano. For centuries,observers have attributed this preference for certain combinations of tones tothe mathematical properties of sound itself.
Some 2,500 years ago,Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between theharmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the objectthat produced it. For example, a plucked string will always play an octavelower than a similar string half its size, and a fifth lower than a similarstring two thirds its length. This link between simple ratios and harmony hasinfluenced music theory ever since.
Section C
This music-is-math idea is oftenaccompanied by the notion that music, formally speaking at least, exists apartfrom the world in which it was created. Writing recently in The New York Reviewof Books, pianist and critic Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notionthat while painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of thenatural world, and writing describes thoughts and feelings we are all familiarwith, music is entirely abstracted from the world in which we live. Neitheridea is right, according to David Schwartz and his colleagues. Human musicalpreferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but bythe messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular – which in turn isshaped by our evolutionary heritage. "The explanation of music, like theexplanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not innumbers per se," says Schwartz.
Schwartz, Howe, and Purvesanalysed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages toreveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus onlyon the raw sounds, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning, andsliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 briefsegments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis ineach sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, correspondedclosely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are tobe found in speech.
Far from being abstract, musicpresents a strange analogue to the patterns created by the sounds of speech."Music, like visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the naturalworld," says Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the waythat visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear theecho of our basic sound-making instrument - the vocal tract. The explanationfor human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: Welike the sounds that are familiar to us - specifically, we like the sounds thatremind us of us.
This brings up somechicken-or-egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates speechdirectly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that languageevolved first. It's also conceivable that music came first and language is ineffect an imitation of song - that in everyday speech we hit the musical noteswe especially like. Alternately, it may be that music imitates the generalproducts of the human sound-making system, which just happens to be mostlyspeech. "We can't know this," says Schwartz. "What we do know isthat they both come from the same system, and it is this that shapes ourpreferences."
Section D
Schwartz's study also castslight on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciatemusic. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in the natural world- birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronised chimpanzee hooting - previousstudies have found that many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity forthe human variety of music making.
Marc Hauser and Josh McDermottof Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don'tcreate or perceive music the way we do. The fact that laboratory monkeys canshow recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared generalfeatures of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability.As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognise their owntunes - a narrow repertoire - but don't generate novel melodies like we do.There are no avian Mozarts.
But what's been played toanimals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences forsound as we do - based upon the soundscape in which they live - then their"music" would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same wayour scales derive from human utterances, a cat's idea of a good tune wouldderive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate soundthe way we do, we'd need evidence that they don't respond to "music"constructed from their own sound environment.
Section E
No matter how the connectionbetween language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense ofmusic, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in ourbrains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub atthe University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the NatureNeuroscience special issue.
For babies, music and speechare on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to "regulate infants'emotional states", Trehub says. Regardless of what language they speak,the voice all mothers use with babies is the same: "something betweenspeech and song". This kind of communication "puts the baby in atrancelike state, which may proceed to sleep or extended periods ofrapture". So if the babies of the world could understand the latestresearch on language and music, they probably wouldn't be very surprised. Theupshot, says Trehub, is that music may be even more of a necessity than werealise.
SECTION 3: QUESTIONS 27-40
Questions 27-31
Reading Passage 3 has five sections A-E.
Choose the correct heading foreach section from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number i-viii inboxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.
27 ____________ Section A
28 ____________ Section B
29 ____________ Section C
30 ____________ Section D
31 ____________ Section E
List of Headings
i
Communication in music with animals
ii
New discoveries on animal music
iii
Music and language contrasted
iv
Current research on music
v
Music is beneficial for infants.
vi
Music transcends cultures.
vii
Look back at some of the historical theories
viii
Are we genetically designed for music?
Questions 32-38
Look at the following people(Questions 32-38) and the list of statements below.
Match each person with thecorrect statement.
Write the correct letter A-G inboxes 32-38 on your answer sheet.
32 ____________ Steven Pinker
33 ____________ Musicologists
34 ____________ Greek philosopherPythagoras
35 ____________ Schwartz, Howe,and Purves
36 ____________ Marc Hauser andJosh McDermott
37 ____________ Charles Rosen
38 ____________ Sandra Trehub
List of Statements
A
Music exists outside of the world it is created in.
B
Music has a universal character despite cultural influences on it.
C
Music is a necessity for humans.
D
Music preference is related to the surrounding influences.
E
He discovered the mathematical basis of music.
F
Music doesn't enjoy the same status of research interest as language.
G
Humans and monkeys have similar traits in perceiving sound.
Questions 39-40
Choose the correct letter A,B, C or D.
Write your answers inboxes 39-40 on your answer sheet.
39Why was the study of animal musicinconclusive?
AAnimals don’t have the same auditorysystem as humans.
BTests on animal music are limited.
CAnimals can’t make up new tunes.
DThere aren’t enough tests on a wide rangeof animals.
40What is the main theme of this passage?
ALanguage and learning
BThe evolution of music
CThe role of music in human society
DMusic for animals
答案
雅思阅读第028套P3-Music: Language We All Speakhttp://www.tuonindefu.com/?p=2262雅思阅读第028套P3: Music:Language We all Speak
