文艺；书评；音乐的科学；听起来很美；

　　The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It. By Philip Ball.

　　音乐本能：音乐的作用机理及人们欲罢不能的缘由。Philip Ball著。

　　Music is a mystery. It is unique to the human race: no other species produces elaborate sound for no particular reason. It has been, and remains, part of every known civilisation on Earth. Lengths of bone fashioned into flutes were in use 40,000 years ago. And it engages people's attention more comprehensively than almost anything else: scans show that when people listen to music, virtually every area of their brain becomes more active.

　　音乐真是神秘。它对人类具有独一无二的意义：没有其他事物可以无端发出如此精美的声音。它曾是且仍然是地球上任何一个已知文明的一部分。人类40000年前就开始使用骨头制成的笛子。而且，音乐较任何其他事物更能让大家全神贯注：观察发现，当人们聆听音乐的时候，大脑的几乎每一个部分都会变得更具活力。

　　Yet it serves no obvious adaptive purpose. Charles Darwin, in “The Descent of Man”, noted that “neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life.” Unwilling to believe that music was altogether useless, Darwin concluded that it may have made man's ancestors more successful at mating. Yet if that were so, you might expect one gender to be musically more gifted than the other, and there is no evidence of that. So what is the point of music?

　　但音乐无法满足适应性需要。查尔斯·达尔文在“人类的遗传”中说道“既非谱曲的乐趣也非此种能力在人们的日常生活习惯方面没有丝毫的直接用处。”由于不相信音乐一无是处，达尔文推断它或许可以使人类祖先的交配成功率更高。然而，如果事实如此，可以预料某一种性别会较另一种在音乐方面更具天赋，而并无显著的证据证实这一点。于是音乐的意义何在呢？

　　Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist best known for his book “The Language Instinct”, has called music “auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties.” If it vanished from our species, he said, “the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.” Others have argued that, on the contrary, music, along with art and literature, is part of what makes people human; its absence would have a brutalising effect. Philip Ball, a British science writer and an avid music enthusiast, comes down somewhere in the middle. He says that music is ingrained in our auditory, cognitive and motor functions. We have a music instinct as much as a language instinct, and could not rid ourselves of it if we tried.

　　认知心理学家Steven Pinker因作品“语言的本能”而出名，他将音乐称为“听觉上的奶酪蛋糕，一份精心制作的高级甜点，至少能对六种心理官能的敏感点有所刺激。”他说，如果人类突然失去音乐，“我们的生活方式将几乎一成不变。”有人争论认为，与此相反，音乐及艺术和文学是人之所以为人的一部分；没有音乐恐怕会使人更具兽性。英国科学作家及音乐的狂热爱好者Philip Ball在其中有所领悟。他认为音乐根植于人们的听觉、知觉和运动技能之中。人类的音乐禀赋同语言不相上下，摆脱音乐可谓欲罢而不能。

　　Music can mean different things in different cultures. But although it is culturally specific, some of its building blocks are universal: melody, harmony, rhythm, the timbre produced by a variety of instruments and the distinctive style added by particular composers. Almost all musical systems are based on scales spanning an octave—the note that sounds the same as the one you started off with, but at a higher or lower pitch. Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher who lived around 500BC, is said to have discovered that notes that sound harmonious together have simple ratios between their frequencies: for example, one that is an octave higher than another has double the frequency. The Pythagorean “diatonic” scale, still the basis of most Western music, is made up from seven notes. But it is far from the only one. Javanese gamelan uses two scales with different numbers of notes; North Indian music has 32 different scales. Arnold Schoenberg devised a 12-tone scheme of atonal music about a century ago.

　　音乐的意义因不同文化而异。但是，即使音乐带有文化特殊性，其某些构建模块却具有普适性：节奏、和谐、韵律、不同乐器产生的音色和特别作曲家增添的迥异乐风。几乎所有的音乐体系都是基于所跨越的八度音阶范围——这一音符的发音同开始时的完全一样，只是音高或高或低。据说，公元前500年左右，希腊哲学家毕达哥拉斯已经发现了发音和谐的音符在频率之间成简单比例：例如，高一个八度的音符具有两倍的频率。毕氏“全音阶”范围仍然是多数西方音乐的基石，它由七个音符组成。但是，这远不是仅有的一个。爪哇的加麦兰乐器使用两个音阶范围，每个音阶具有不同的音符数；北美印第安音乐具有32个不同音阶范围。一个世纪以前，Arnold Schoenberg已经设计出一种无调音乐，由12音色组合而成。

　　Mr Ball goes through each component of music in turn to explain how and why it works, using plentiful examples drawn from a refreshingly wide range of different kinds of music, from Bach to the Beatles, and from nursery rhymes to jazz. If you can read music, you will find yourself humming aloud to see what he means. If you can't, you might occasionally get lost among the technicalities. But before things get too rarefied, Mr Ball's facility for conveying complex facts in simple language comes to the rescue.

　　Ball先生曾通过依次检查音乐的每个成分来解释其运作机理，他从大量不同种类的音乐中抽取实例，从巴赫到披头士，从童谣到爵士乐。如果你能领悟音乐，你会发现自己通过大声哼唱来理解其中的含义。如果不能领悟，或许你会偶尔迷失在专业术语中。但是在事情变得简化之前，Ball先生以简单语言表达复杂实事的作用可以来救救场。

　　His basic message is encouraging and uplifting: people know much more about music than they think. They start picking up the rules from the day they are born, perhaps even before, by hearing it all around them. Very young children can tell if a tune or harmony is not quite right. One of the joys of listening to music is a general familiarity with the way it is put together: to know roughly what to expect, then to see in what particular ways your expectations will be met or exceeded. Most adults can differentiate between kinds of music even if they have had no training.

　　他的基本信息就是鼓励和激昂：大家对音乐的了解远超所想。通过倾听环绕周身的音乐，人们对音乐规则的无师自通与生俱来，或许更早。特别年幼的儿童也能感觉出一个曲调或和声是否正确。聆听音乐的一大乐趣就是对音乐组合方式的总体领悟：大概了解所期望的内容，而后知道你所期望的东西以什么具体方式得到满足或超越。多数成年人即使不经特殊训练也能区分不同类型的音乐。

　　Music is completely sui generis. It should not tell a non-musical story; the listener will decode it for himself. Many, perhaps most, people have experienced a sudden rush of emotion on hearing a particular piece of music; a thrill or chill, a sense of excitement or exhilaration, a feeling of being swept away by it. They may even be moved to tears, without being able to tell why. Musical analysts have tried hard to find out how this happens, but with little success. Perhaps some mysteries are best preserved.

　　音乐完全自成一格。它不应该讲述一个无音乐的故事；听者会自我解构。许多人，或许是大多数人，曾经历过一听到某首特别的乐曲而突然迸发情感；一个震颤或寒颤，一份激动感或者兴奋感，被其一扫而空的感觉。人们甚至不知道究竟就被感动落泪。音乐分析家曾努力寻找发生这些现象的原因，但鲜有成功。或许，某些神秘隐藏其中。