科学美国人60秒 研究人员分析民间音乐，发现生活和艺术的相似之处（在线收听）

Researchers Analyzed Folk Music like It Was DNA: They Found Parallels between Life and Art

研究人员分析民间音乐，发现生活和艺术的相似之处

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of evolution. Living things evolve by accumulating genetic changes, which are then weeded out or preserved through a process of natural selection.

Turns out the same thing happens in music. And by using the same software that’s used to track mutations in genes, researchers have mapped out the sorts of changes that shape the evolution of songs. The findings appear in the journal Current Biology. [Patrick E. Savage et. al, Sequence alignment of folk song melodies reveals cross-cultural regularities of musical evolution]

Patrick Savage: I’ve always loved music since I was a child.

凯伦霍普金：这是科学美国人的 60 秒科学。 我是凯伦霍普金。

您可能熟悉进化的概念。 生物通过积累遗传变化而进化，然后通过自然选择过程将其淘汰或保存。

事实证明，同样的事情也发生在音乐中。 通过使用用于追踪基因突变的同一软件，研究人员已经绘制出了影响歌曲进化的各种变化。 研究结果发表在《当代生物学》杂志上。 [帕特里克·E·萨维奇等。 al，民歌旋律的序列排列揭示了音乐演变的跨文化规律]

Patrick Savage：我从小就喜欢音乐。

Hopkin: Patrick Savage, an ethnomusicologist at Keio University in Fujisawa, Japan.

霍普金：Patrick Savage，日本藤泽庆应义塾大学的民族音乐学家。

Savage: I grew up singing English folk songs. My dad really likes folk music and often has his friends come over and do jam sessions at home. Then, when I moved to Japan about 11 years ago, I started studying Japanese folk songs. And I really liked that repertoire, too.

Savage：我是唱着英国民歌长大的。 我爸爸非常喜欢民间音乐，经常让他的朋友过来在家做即兴演奏。 然后，当我大约 11 年前移居日本时，我开始学习日本民歌。 我也很喜欢那个曲目。

Hopkin: The style was very different from the music he grew up with.

霍普金：风格与他长大的音乐非常不同。

Savage: So, like [sings tonal sounds].

Savage：所以，就像[唱音调的声音]。

Hopkin: Yet the way the songs are learned, by trying to imitate a recording or a teacher, is pretty much the same.

霍普金：然而，通过模仿录音或老师来学习歌曲的方式几乎是一样的。

Savage: So it made sense to test these ideas about “Are these general evolutionary rules that we find in music, especially in these folk songs, repertoires I know, that would kind of parallel what we find in genetics and allow us to get a more sort of general unifying theory about music and evolution across different cultures?”

Savage：因此，测试这些想法是有意义的：“我们在音乐中发现的这些一般进化规则，尤其是在这些民歌中，我知道的曲目，这与我们在遗传学中发现的相似，并让我们获得更多 某种关于音乐和不同文化进化的普遍统一理论？”

Hopkin: At first, he and his colleagues hoped to tackle a huge reconstruction of the family tree of all folk music.

霍普金：起初，他和他的同事希望解决所有民间音乐家谱的巨大重建问题。

Savage: But kind of quickly, [we] realized that it was very—it would be quite challenging to do because when you build these phylogenies, these family trees, you kind of have to make a lot of assumptions about how the process works.

Savage：但是很快，[我们] 意识到这非常——这将非常具有挑战性，因为当你建立这些系统发育、这些家谱时，你必须对这个过程的运作方式做出很多假设。

Hopkin: So, for example, geneticists know what kinds of mutations crop up in DNA—and with what frequency—information they can then use to assemble and calibrate their gene-based phylogenetic trees. But Savage says they didn’t have the same level of knowledge for music.

霍普金：因此，例如，遗传学家知道 DNA 中会出现哪些类型的突变——以及以何种频率出现——然后他们可以使用这些信息来组装和校准基于基因的系统发育树。 但萨维奇说他们对音乐的了解程度不同。

Savage: So we decided that, rather than try to do the big reconstructions, we would first focus on the simplest case, which is the pairs.

Savage：所以我们决定，与其尝试进行大的重构，不如先关注最简单的情况，即配对。

Hopkin: Savage and his team combed through enormous catalogs of English and Japanese folk songs to identify pairs of melodies that were clearly related—like two different versions of the song “Scarborough Fair,” which is actually based on a traditional English ballad about an elfin knight.

霍普金：Savage 和他的团队梳理了大量的英语和日语民歌目录，找出了明显相关的一对旋律——比如歌曲“斯卡伯勒集市”的两个不同版本，它实际上是基于一首关于小精灵的传统英国民谣 骑士。

[CLIP: Woman sings “Scarborough Fair”]

Savage: With the English ones, people had been going out there and notating things by ear since at least the early 1900s.

Savage：对于英国人来说，至少从 1900 年代初开始，人们就一直在外面用耳朵记录事物。

Hopkin: And by the mid-1900s, a similar process had begun in Japan.

霍普金：到 1900 年代中期，日本也开始了类似的过程。

Savage: They just kind of sent teams of scholars out throughout all of Japan and said, “We need to collect all the folk songs before they disappear.”

萨维奇：他们只是派了一批学者到日本全境，说：“我们需要在它们消失之前收集所有的民歌。”

Hopkin: So Savage had a pool of some 10,000 tunes to work with.

霍普金：所以 Savage 有大约 10,000 首曲子可供使用。

Savage: I just had to go through and just and look at the notations in the anthologies and kind of sing them to myself as I converted them into these sequences of text—Cs and Ds and Gs and things like that—so we could run the sequence alignment algorithms on them.

Savage：我只需要仔细阅读选集中的符号，然后在将它们转换成这些文本序列（Cs、Ds 和 Gs 之类的）时对自己唱歌，这样我们就可以运行 序列比对算法。

Hopkin: So what did team Savage learn? Well, a few things.

霍普金：那么 Savage 团队学到了什么？ 嗯，有几件事。

Savage: One was that more functional notes, notes that had stronger rhythm functions, would be more stable.

Savage：一个是功能性更强的音符，节奏功能更强的音符，会更稳定。

Hopkin: So notes that are key to the melody.

霍普金：所以音符是旋律的关键。

Savage: You listen to “Scarborough Fair,” the end, you know, “She once was a true love of mine.” The final note is a very strong downbeat. And it’s also the last note where you’re kind of always expecting a note. So very rarely would you end on like “She once was a true love of mine.” It feels very unfinished. Likewise, you would never expect that note to just be deleted. You wouldn’t expect “She once was a true love of....” That would just be very strange.

Savage：你听“斯卡伯勒集市”的结尾，你知道，“她曾经是我的真爱。” 最后一个音符是一个非常强烈的悲观。 这也是你总是期待一个音符的最后一个音符。 所以你很少会像“她曾经是我的真爱”这样结束。 感觉很没完没了。 同样，您永远不会期望该注释会被删除。 你不会想到“她曾经是……的真爱”，那会很奇怪。

Hopkin: Next, they found that when one note mutates to another note, the changes tend to be small.

霍普金：接下来，他们发现当一个音符突变为另一个音符时，变化往往很小。

Savage: So like one or two semitones above or below where it would have been rather than six or seven semitones. Which would be a difference of like, [sings] “la la” versus like [sings] “la la.”

Savage:所以就像在本来应该是六或七个半音的地方高出或低一两个半音。 这将是一个区别，[sings] “la la” 与 like [sings] “la la”。

Hopkin: Here, for example, Savage sings snippets of a Japanese lullaby.

霍普金：例如，在这里，萨维奇会唱日本摇篮曲的片段。

Savage: These ones have different lyrics but almost the same melody. The first one was notated from the singing of Tonsui Kikuchi. And it sounds something like this [sings].

And the second one, notated from the singing of Shigeri Kitsu, sounds like this [sings].

So the differences there, for example, the last one [sings] versus [sings] are very small, just a semitone difference, but [they are] an example of a small substitution distance.

Savage：这些歌词不同，但旋律几乎相同。 第一个是菊地通水的歌声。 听起来像这样[唱歌]。

第二个，从 Shigeri Kitsu 的歌声中记录下来，听起来像这样 [sings]。

所以那里的差异，例如，最后一个 [sings] 与 [sings] 非常小，只是半音差异，但 [它们是] 小替换距离的一个例子。

Hopkin: Such small substitutions have minimal effect on the overall melody. So they’re the essentially the musical equivalent of what geneticists call a “neutral mutation,” one that doesn’t alter an organism’s fitness.

Now, all that seems pretty straightforward. But the next finding was a bit of a surprise.

霍普金：这样小的替换对整体旋律的影响很小。 因此，它们本质上是遗传学家所谓的“中性突变”的音乐等价物，不会改变生物体的适应性。

现在，这一切似乎都很简单。 但接下来的发现有点出人意料。

Savage: There’s two different kinds of mutations you can have in genetics or music. The substitutions are one-note changes to another note. Or you can have an insertion or deletion where a note is either inserted or deleted from the sequence or a nucleotide is inserted or deleted from the sequence. In genetics, these are very rare.

Savage：您可以在遗传学或音乐中进行两种不同的突变。 替换是一个音符对另一个音符的变化。 或者，您可以进行插入或删除，其中在序列中插入或删除注释，或者从序列中插入或删除核苷酸。 在遗传学中，这些是非常罕见的。

Hopkin: That’s because the instructions carried by genes are read in sets of three nucleotides. Add or remove just one, and you throw off the whole register, which messes up the rest of the message.

霍普金：那是因为基因携带的指令是以三个核苷酸为一组读取的。 只添加或删除一个，你就会扔掉整个寄存器，这会弄乱消息的其余部分。

Savage: But we found, in music, insertions/deletions were actually quite a bit more common than the substitutions.

Savage：但我们发现，在音乐中，插入/删除实际上比替换更常见。

Hopkin: That’s because they can easily be accommodated by holding other notes longer or singing some faster, leaving the melody intact. So in one version of “Scarborough Fair” ...

霍普金：那是因为他们可以很容易地通过将其他音符保持更长的时间或更快地唱一些来适应它们，从而保持旋律完整。 所以在“斯卡伯勒集市”的一个版本中......

Savage: So Martin Carthy kinda sings, “Parsley sa-a-age, rosemary and thyme.” And Simon and Garfunkel just sing “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.” So, this little “sa-a-age” ornament is just deleted. But they just sing the “sage” a little bit longer, and it takes up the same amount of rhythmic space.

Savage:所以马丁卡锡有点唱，“欧芹，迷迭香和百里香。” 西蒙和加芬克尔只唱“欧芹、鼠尾草、迷迭香和百里香”。 所以，这个小小的“sa-a-age”装饰就被删除了。 但他们只是唱“圣人”的时间长了一点，它占用了同样多的节奏空间。

Hopkin: Savage says that many of these mutations, like their genetic counterparts, are probably accidental.

霍普金：萨维奇说，许多这些突变，就像它们的基因对应物一样，可能是偶然的。

Savage: That’s what I do when I learn songs. I’ll be learning from my singer, and then I’ll record myself singing, and I’ll realize that I’ve sung a couple of notes a little bit different—a little bit higher here, a little bit lower there. Or I added an extra note by accident. I’m usually not consciously trying to change what my teacher has sung. But it’s just easy to crop up.

Savage：这就是我学习歌曲时所做的。 我会向我的歌手学习，然后我会录制自己的歌声，我会意识到我唱的几个音符有点不同——这里高一点，那里低一点。 或者我不小心添加了一个额外的注释。 我通常不会有意识地试图改变我老师唱的东西。 但这很容易出现。

Hopkin: Using a genetic approach to analyze melodies also has some practical applications.

霍普金：使用遗传方法分析旋律也有一些实际应用。

Savage: We can apply these sequence alignment techniques to quantify how similar two songs are and how likely the changes are to happen and sort of have little bit more quantitative evidence for these high-profile multimillion-dollar [copyright] cases like “Blurred Lines” or George Harrison’s case with the Chiffons and “My Sweet Lord”/“He’s So Fine.”

Savage：我们可以应用这些序列比对技术来量化两首歌曲的相似程度以及发生变化的可能性，并且为这些备受瞩目的数百万美元 [版权] 案例（例如“模糊线条”）提供更多定量证据 或者乔治哈里森的雪纺案和“我亲爱的主”/“他很好”。

Hopkin: At the same time, Savage looks forward to continuing to explore music’s ancestral roots as a scientist and as a musician.

霍普金：与此同时，萨维奇期待作为科学家和音乐家继续探索音乐的祖源。

Savage: Everyone’s always inspired by the great musicians of the past. But, like, these currents of evolution go back hundreds of thousands of years. So, yeah, it’s kind of this sort of connection with other humans through music at a very deep level and throughout time is one that kind of excites me as a performer.

Savage：每个人总是受到过去伟大音乐家的启发。 但是，就像，这些进化潮流可以追溯到数十万年前。 所以，是的，这是一种通过音乐与其他人类建立非常深层次的联系，并且贯穿整个时间，这让我作为一名表演者感到兴奋。

Hopkin: And it makes his science sing.

霍普金：这让他进行科学歌唱。

[CLIP: Patrick Savage and Gakuto Chiba sing the same Japanese folk song, “Kuroda Bushi”]

Hopkin: Special thanks to Pat Savage and his student Gakuto Chiba for their vocals. And a final note on “Scarborough Fair.” The first version you heard came by way of Wikimedia Commons user Makemi. We’ll include a link to that recording in the podcast transcript. And our bonus, hidden track was sung by Mrs. G. A. Griffith in 1939, recorded by John and Ruby Lomax.

Hopkin: For Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Karen Hopkin.

霍普金：特别感谢 Pat Savage 和他的学生 Gakuto Chiba 的演唱。 最后是关于“斯卡伯勒集市”的说明。 您听到的第一个版本来自 Wikimedia Commons 用户 Makemi。 我们将在播客记录中包含指向该录音的链接。 1939 年，G.A. Griffith 夫人演唱了我们的隐藏曲目，由 John 和 Ruby Lomax 录制。

霍普金：对于科学美国人的 60 秒科学，我是凯伦霍普金。