2021年7月24日雅思考試機經(jīng)回憶完整版(4)

2023-05-23 14:49:11 來源：中國教育在線

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2021年7月24日雅思考試機經(jīng)回憶完整版(4)

2021.07.24

READING

Passage 3

Topic

Songs of ourselves

Soction A

Music is one of the human specie ' s relatively few universal ailities. Without formal training, any indvidual, from Stone Age tnibes man to suburban leenager, has the ablity to recognize muslc and, in some fashion, TO MAKE IT. Why this should be so is a mystery. After all music isn' t necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does s0 only in highly indiret ways. Language.

by contrast, is also everywhere- but for resons that are more obvious. With langugge. you and the members of your tribe can organlze a mlgration across Afnica, bulld reed boats and Cross the seas, and communicale at night even when you can" t see each other. Modern culture, in all its technological extra vagance, springs directy from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax.

Scientists have always been intrigued by the connection between music and language. Yet over the years, words and melody have acquired a vastly dfferent status in the lab and the seminar room. While language has long been considered essential to unocking the mechanisms of human ielligence, music is generally treated as an evolutionary frippery-- mere . auditory cheese cake," as the Harvard cognitive scienist Steven Pinker puts it.

Section B

But thanks to a decade-long wave of neuroscience research, that tune is changing- A furry of recent publications suggests that language and music may equally be able to tell us who were are and where we" re from nolt just emotionally, but biologically And in an article in the August 6 Isse of the Journal of Neurosclence, David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke Universily argued that the sounds of music and the sounds of language are intricately connected.

To grasp the orinality of this idea. its ’necessary to realize two things about how music has traditinally been understood. First musicologists have lone emphasized that while each culture stamps a special identity onto its music, music itself has some universal qulties. For example, in wrually all cultures sound is dlvided into some or all of the 2 intervals that make up the chromatic scale - that is, the scale represented by the keys on a plano, For centurles, observers have atributed this preference for certain combinations of tones to the mathematical properties of sound iself.

Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between the harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced it. For example, a plucked string wi always play an odave lower than a similar sting half is size, and a fth over than a similar string two-thirds is length. This link between simple ratios and harmony has Infuenced muslc theory ever since.

Section C

This music-is-math idea is ofen accompanied by the notion thnat music, formally speaking a leas, exists apart from the world in which it was created. Writing recently in The New York Review of Books, pianist and cric Chartes Rosen discussed the long-standing notion that while painting and sculplure reproduce at least some aspects of the natural wonld, and writing describes thoughts and felinsg we are all famllar with. music is entirely abstracted from the world in which we live . Neither idea is right, according 1o David Sdhwarz and his col eagues. Human musical preterences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algoritms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular- which in turm is shaped by our evolutionary heritage. ' The explanalion of music, like the explanation of any produdt of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, nol in numbers perse,' says Schwartz.

Schwar, Howe, and Punves analyzed a vast selecion of speech sounds from a variey of languages to reveal the undertying patems common to all utrances. In order to focus only on the raw sound, they discarded all theorles about speech and meanlng and slced sentences Into random bites. Using a database of over 100.000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discowered, crresponded closely to the chromatic scale. 1 short, the building blocks of music are 1t0 be found in speech.

Far from being abstract, music presents a strange analog to the pttems created by the sounds of speech. 'Muslc, like the visual arts, Is rooted in our experlence of the natural world,’. says Schwartz.

'It emulates or sound environment in the way that visual ats emulale the wisual environment,' In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument- the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler sill than Pythagoras " s mathematical equalins: We like the sounds that are familar to us specifica y, we like sounds that remind us of u ,

This brings up some chicken -or egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates speech direclly the researchers say, in which case i謂would seem that language evolved first. It' s also conceivable that music came first and language is in efct an imitation of song- that in everyday speech we hit the musical notes we espeialy like. Alemately, it may be that music imitates the general producds of the human sound-making system. which just happens to be mostly speech. "We can' tknow this.' says Schwartz 'What we do knaw is that they both come from the same system, and it is this that shapes our preterences.'

Section D

Schwartz’s study also casts lIght on the long-running qustions of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despie the apparent abundance of 'music' in the naural world - birdsong. whale song, wolf howis, synchronized chimpanzee hooting prewious studies have found that many

laboratory animals don'↑show a grea afinity for the human varety of music making.

Marc Huaser and Josh McDermot of Harvard argued In the July isue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don'↓create or percelve music the way we do. The fact that laboratory monkeys can show

recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say of shared general features of the auditory system. not any specic chimpanzee musical abily, As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognice their won tunes a narrow repertoire”but don”t generale novel melodies like we do There are no avian Mozarts.

But what' s been played to the animals, 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 diferent from ours. In the same way our scales derive from human utrances, a cat' idea of a good tune would derive from yows and meows, To demonstrate Ihat animals don' I appreciale sounds the way we do, we' d need evidence that they dan" trespond to。 music' constructed form their own sound environment.

Section E

No mater how the conection between language and muslc is parsed, what Is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as language is.

This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto, who also published a | paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue. For babies, music and speech are on a coninuum.

Mothers use musical speech to“ regulate infant' emotional states." Trehub says. Regardless of what language they speak, the voice all mothers use wth bables is the same: something between speech and song.

This kind of communication“ puts: the baby in a trance-ike state, which may probably woukan' t be very surprised. The upshol. says Trehub, is that music may be even more of necessity than

we realize.

27-31題為LOH

i communication in music with animals

i new discoveries on animal music

ili music and language contrasted

iv music's infuence on children's math leaming

v current research on music

vi music transcends cultures

vi look back at some of the historical theones

vii are we genetially designed for music?

27.SectionA Il

28.Secion B vii