经济学人｜为什么听录制音乐的感受永远比不上听现场

Science and Technology
科技
Neuroscience
神经科学
Nothing better than the real thing
没有什么比真的更好了
Why recorded music will never feel as good as being at a concert
为什么听录制音乐的感受永远比不上听现场

In a world of music streaming services, access to almost any song is just a few clicks away. Yet, the live gig lives on. People still fill sweaty basements, muddy fields and gilded concert halls to hear their favourite musicians play. And now neuroscientists might know why: live music engages the brain's emotion centres more than its recorded counterpart.

Concerts are immersive social experiences in which people listen to and feel the music together through crescendos, key changes and drops. They are also dynamic--artists can adapt their playing according to the crowd's reaction.

It was this last difference that led neuroscientists, based at the Universities of Zurich and Oslo, to study the brain responses of people listening to music. In the“live" experiment, participants lay in an MRI scanner listening to the music through earphones, while a pianist was positioned outside the room. The pianist was shown the participant's real-time brain activity as a form of feedback. In the recorded condition, participants listened to pre-recorded versions of the same tunes.

The scientists were interested in how live music affected the areas of the brain that process emotions. In the live condition pianists were instructed to try and modulate their playing in order to drive the activity in one of these regions known as the amygdala, an almond-shaped area deep inside the brain.

The results, just published in the journalPNAS, showed that live music had far more emotional impact. Whether the music was happy or sad, listening to the pianist playing in a dynamic way generated more activity in both the amygdala and other parts of the brain's emotion processing network. The researchers also found that participants' brain activity tracked the acoustic features of the music, like tempo and pitch, far more closely when it was played live.

The study was far from replicating the real experience of a gig, and the authors noted that the live music ended up sounding quite different from the recorded tracks, which may have driven some of the differences in participant's brain activity. But the results indicate that the ability of artists to change the way they play in response to the audience may be one aspect of what makes live music special. Some musical acts now attempt to recreate the real gig experience with everything but the artist-ABBA Voyage is a social, immersive show performed entirely by pre-recorded hologram avatars. But without Benny's ability to read the mood of the room, it will never quite match the real thing.

词汇表
recorded music 录制音乐
streaming services [ˈstriːmɪŋ] 流媒体业务
live gig [ɡɪɡ] 现场演出
sweaty basements ['sweti]['beɪsmənt] 闷热的地下室
muddy fields ['mʌdɪ] 泥泞的户外
gilded concert halls [ˈɡɪldɪd] 金碧辉煌的音乐厅
neuroscientists [ˌnjʊərəʊˈsaɪəntɪst] 神经科学家
counterpart [ˈkaʊntə(r)ˌpɑː(r)t] 对应的人（或事物）
immersive [ɪ'mɜ:sɪv] 沉浸式的，身临其境的
crescendo [krəˈʃendəʊ]（音乐的）渐强，声音渐增
key changes 音调变化
drop （音乐）高潮部分
dynamic [daɪ'næmɪk] 动态的，不断变化的
MRI scanner [ˈskænə(r)] 核磁共振扫描仪(magnetic resonance imaging)
position 安置，使处于
real-time 实时的，及时处理的
tune [tjuːn] 曲子，曲调
modulate [ˈmɒdjʊleɪt] 调节，调整（声音等），变调
amygdala [ə'mɪɡdələ] 杏仁核
almond-shaped [ˈɑːmənd] 杏仁状的
PNAS 美国国家科学院院刊(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
acoustic [əˈkuːstɪk] 听觉的，声学的，音响的
tempo [ˈtempəʊ] （音乐的）节奏，拍子
pitch [pɪtʃ] 音准，音高
replicate [ˈreplɪkeɪt] 复制，复现，重复
track（光盘、录音磁带等上的）一首歌，一支乐曲
hologram [ˈhɒləɡræm] 全息图，全息摄影
avatar [ˈævəˌtɑː(r)] 虚拟化身，替身

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