原文译文
Is a Sad Song Sad for Everyone?
一首悲伤的歌是否对每个人来说都是悲伤的?
Researchers explore how different cultures respond to the same music
研究人员探索不同文化对同一音乐的反应
1. The ability of music to evoke specific, often powerful feelings is no secret to anyone who has listened to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated,” Lizzo’s “Good as Hell” or any of the other countless compositions that have found their way onto Western playlists in the past few centuries.
音乐能够唤起人们某种特定的、强烈的感情这一点，任何听过古斯塔夫•马勒《第五交响曲》、比莉·荷莉戴的《天佑之子》、雷蒙斯的《我想要静静》、利佐的《我爽到飞起》或者其他过去几个世纪中西方经典音乐作品的人的人对此都是没有异议的。
2. The emotional effects of music are the point, of course. They are also the subject of a burgeoning field of research around the world in which scientists are exploring the nature of the many “subjective experiences”—such as joy, sadness, anxiety and serenity—that music induces.
当然，音乐引发的情感共鸣是关键。它们也是世界各地一个新兴研究领域的主题，科学家们正在探索音乐所引发的许多“主观体验”——如喜悦、悲伤、焦虑和宁静——的本质。
3. In a recent set of experiments, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and their colleagues sought to determine if the feelings that people experience when listening to music “show evidence of universality.” They compared and analyzed how more than 2,800 U.S. and Chinese study participants responded to 2,168 (mostly Western) samples of instrumental music.
在最近的一系列实验中，加州大学伯克利分校(University of California, Berkeley)的研究人员事试图确定，人们在听音乐时的感受是否“具有同一特征”。他们比较并分析了2800多名美国和中国研究对象对2168首器乐样本(大部分是西方的)的反应。
4. As it reports in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, the team identified 13 distinct and very specific feelings that the Chinese and U.S. subjects shared when listening to music, despite their cultural differences.
研究小组在本周出版的《美国国家科学院院刊》上发表的一篇论文中指出，尽管中美两国文化不同，但研究对象在听音乐时却有13种截然不同且非常具体的感受。
5. The music used in the research, described in the paper as “the richeststimulus set of Western music samples ever studied,” included classical, pop, rock, indie, hip-hop, R&B, country, film soundtracks, and more. An additional 189 samples of traditional Chinese music were also used. In all, the researchers gathered 375,230 judgments of the samples from the study participants.
研究中使用的音乐，在论文中被描述为“研究过的最丰富的西方音乐样本”，包括古典、流行、摇滚、独立、嘻哈、节奏布鲁斯、乡村、电影原声等等。另外还使用了189个中国传统音乐样本。研究人员总共收集了375,230个判断样本。
6. In the first experiment, subjects listened to Western music samples (each of which was just five seconds long) and reported on the specific feelings they evoked, choosing responses from a list of 28 “categories of subjective experience” provided by the researchers. Terms on the list included “triumphant/heroic,” “sad/depressing,” “joyful/cheerful,” “awe-inspiring/amazing” and “dreamy.” The team then used data-driven statistical modeling to identify the 13 shared experiences.
在第一个实验中，受试者听西方音乐样本(每个只有5秒长)，并根据这些音乐在他们身上引起的感受，从研究人员提供的28种“主观体验类别”中选择相应的类别。描述这些感受的词汇包括“胜利的/英雄的”、“悲伤的/沮丧的”、“快乐的/高兴的”、“令人敬畏的/惊人的”和“梦幻的”。然后，该团队使用数据驱动的统计模型来确定这13个共同的经历。
7. The second experiment, which included the Chinese music, involved broad evaluations of the samples by participants—such as whether the subjects liked or disliked them or found them exciting or not. A central finding of the study, the researchers write, is that specific feelings “drive the experience of music” more than the broader features. “When we hear a triumphant music sample, for example, somehow it unlocks this feeling of victory, of achievement,” says Alan S. Cowen, a co-author of the paper and currently a visiting faculty researcher at Google. “We’re thinking of something basic about the human experience.”
第二个实验中包含中国音乐，涉及到参与者对样本的广泛评估——例如受试者是否喜欢它们，或者是否觉得它们令人兴奋。研究人员写道，这项研究的一个重要发现是，特定的情感“推动音乐体验”的作用超过了其他更广泛的因素。“例如，当我们听到胜利的音乐样本时，它在某种程度上释放了这种胜利和成就的感觉，”论文作者之一、谷歌学院客座研究员艾伦·S·考恩(Alan S. Cowen)说。“我们正在思考一些关于人类经验的基本问题。”
8. Comparing Eastern and Western cultures is “a bit of a generalization,” Cowen acknowledges. But “it does capture an axis along which people do vary.” Differences in cultural norms and values noted in the paper include individualism in the U.S. versus collectivism in China and the relative importance of tradition in the two societies.
考恩承认，比较东西方文化“有点泛化”。但是“它确实抓住了人们变化的一个轴。”文中提到的文化规范和价值观的差异包括美国的个人主义与中国的集体主义，以及两个社会中传统的相对重要性。
9. William Forde Thompson, a professor of psychology at Macquarie University in Australia and director of the school’s Music, Sound and Performance Lab, wonders about the role played by the global influence of Western culture. “The novel finding here is that there is a lot of overlap in how Chinese and American participants assign emotional labels to music,” says Thompson, who was not involved in the research. “This is important information, but it might be explained by the considerable overlap in exposure that participants have to Western media and the emotional vocabulary that is communicated by such media. It seems unlikely the overlap observed between American and Chinese listeners would be observed for all cultural groups, but that is an open question."
澳大利亚麦考瑞大学(Macquarie University)心理学教授、该校音乐、声音与表演实验室(Music, Sound and Performance Lab)主任威廉•福德•汤普森(William Forde Thompson)想要研究西方文化的全球影响力。“这实验中的新发现是，中国人和美国人给音乐贴上情感标签的方式有很多重叠之处，”汤普森说，他没有参与这项研究。“这是很重要的信息，但这可能是因为参与者对西方媒体的接触与此类媒体传达的情感词汇有相当大的重叠。”美国和中国听众之间所观察到的重叠现象似乎不可能在所有文化群体中都存在，但这是一个悬而未决的问题。”
10. That concern is echoed by Samuel Mehr, head of the Music Lab at Harvard University. “The paper raises a lot of interesting questions about how music and emotion work,” says Mehr, who also did not participate in the research. “This is a huge topic and one that we don’t understand very well at all, but [this study] does a better job than any other paper I’ve seen on the topic at figuring out what emotions are there, at least in the music that they are studying. But I don’t think we know at all how this generalizes to other forms of music, other cultures and that sort of thing.”
哈佛大学(Harvard University)音乐实验室负责人塞缪尔•梅尔(Samuel Mehr)也表达了同样的担忧。“这篇论文提出了很多关于音乐和情感如何关联的有趣问题，”梅尔说，他也没有参与这项研究。“这是一个很大的课题，我们对它的理解还不是很透彻，但(这项研究)比我所见过的任何一篇关于这个课题的论文都要出色，至少在他们研究的音乐中是这样。但我认为这些发现并不一定适用于其他形式的音乐和其他的文化。”
11. For their part, Cowen and his co-authors, including principal investigator Dacher Keltner of U.C. Berkeley, address the issue head-on in their paper. “In introducing quantitative approaches to study US and Chinese experiences of music,” they write, “we hope to set the stage for a broader project documenting shared and culture-specific understandings of music around the world. Different experiences may emerge when studying musical traditions from other regions, such as Africa and South America.” Of particular interest, they note in the paper, will be the subjective experiences “associated with music in small-scale cultures with limited Western contact.”
考恩和他的合著者，包括加州大学伯克利分校的首席研究员达切尔·凯尔特纳，在他们的论文中正面论述了这个问题。“通过引入定量的方法来研究美国和中国的音乐体验，”他们写道，“我们希望为一个更广泛的研究世界各地理解音乐的项目打下基础，这一项目会研究人们对音乐的共同理解和基于不同文化的特定理解。在研究其他地区的音乐传统，如非洲或者南美洲的时候，可能会有不同的体验。”他们在论文中指出，特别有趣的是研究“与西方接触很少的那些地区文化的音乐体验”时的主观体验。
精读解析
篇章结构
P1—P2：音乐能引起人们的情感共鸣，科学家们尝试探索音乐引发的主观体验的本质。
P3—P7：加拿大伯克利分校的研究人员试图研究人们的音乐感受是否具有同一性。
P8—P10：关于研究的讨论：有点泛化，但是确实抓住了人们音乐体验变化的轴；人们的音乐体验确实有重叠之处，但是这些重叠是否在其他音乐形式、其他文化中存在是一个悬而未决的问题；对关于这一课题的研究还不够透彻，需要更进一步。
P11：研究者希望这次研究能为该领域的研究打下一定的基础。
重点单词
burgeoning/'bə:dʒəniŋ/ adj. 迅速成长的; 迅速发展的
【同根】
burgeon n. 嫩芽；嫩枝；vt. 发(芽)；抽(枝) ；迅速发展
【例句】
In emerging economies it is the high-status tipple for a burgeoning middle class.
在经济迅速发展的时代，威士忌是为越来越多的中产阶级所提供的高级饮酒。
serenity/sɪ'renɪtɪ/ n. 平静，宁静；晴朗，风和日丽
【例句】
The serenity with which the impertinent assault was borne was complete.
一道声响打破了极地的宁静安谧。
induce/ɪn'djuːs/ vt. 引诱；[电]感应；[医]诱导；引起
【例句】
What induced you to do such a thing?
是什么引诱你做这样的傻事？
universality/ˌjuːnɪvɜː'sælətɪ/ n. 普遍性；通用性；普适性；一般性；(知识、才能、兴趣等的)多方面性，广泛性
【例句】
I believe, it is the universality of his themes and stories which makes him great.
我相信，是他的普遍性的文章和故事使他伟大。
stimulus/'stɪmjʊləs/ n. 刺激；激励；刺激物
【例句】
We have got to have a fiscal stimulus to jumpstart this economy.
我们必须要有政府财政的剌激，才能够重新启动我们的经济。
an open question n. 未解决的问题；容许争论的问题；有争议的问题
【例句】
It remains an open question if peanut butter or products with peanut paste would be likely candidates for the technique.
花生酱或含有花生糊的产品是否可能应用这种技术杀菌，这仍然是一个未解决的问题。
