研究：不断重复的声音听起来会音乐化

Music includes a lot of repetition. What would your favorite song be without a chorus? But the connection runs even deeper than that. Because the very act of repeating something can render that thing melodious—even the sound of a shovel being dragged across the pavement. That’s according to a study to be published soon in the journal Music & Science. [Rhimmon Simchy-Gross and Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, The Sound-to-Music Illusion: Repetition Can Musicalize Non-Speech Sounds, in press]

音乐包括很多的重复声音。如果没有合唱部分，你最喜欢的歌曲会是什么样子呢？不过，这种联系实际上比这个还要紧密。因为重复某样东西，会让它变得悦耳——即便是铁锹划过路面的声音。这是基于即将发表在《音乐与科学》杂志上的一项研究得出的结论。[Rhimmon Simchy-Gross和Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis，从声音到音乐的幻觉：重复可以使非言语声音音乐化]

A few years back, psychologists at the University of California, San Diego, discovered that when words or phrases are repeated a few times, they can start to sound more like singing than speaking.

几年前，加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校的心理学家发现，当单词或短语重复几次后，听起来就更像是唱歌而不是说话。

<<“The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible. But they sometimes behave so strangely. Sometimes behave so strangely. Sometimes behave so strangely. So strangely. So strangely. So strangely. So strangely.” Credit: speech to song illusion/Deutsch>>

“这些声音呈现给你的感觉，不仅与那些声音本身不同了，而且有时它们还表现得如此奇怪，好像是不太可能的一样。而且有时它们表现的如此奇怪，有时它们表现的如此奇怪，有时它们表现的如此奇怪，如此奇怪，如此奇怪，如此奇怪，如此奇怪……”

The effect is perhaps not entirely surprising. Talking and singing are both forms of vocal communication. But researchers got to wondering: could repetition also musicalize other types of sounds?

效果可能在意料之中。说话和唱歌都是口头交流的形式。但是研究人员认为：重复是否能使其他类型的声音也音乐化呢？

So they collected clips of 20 different environmental sounds…including water dripping, ice cracking, whales calling, and the aforementioned shovel. And they played the snippets to 58 undergraduates…first, as single sounds <> and then in a series with increasing reiteration <>.

于是，他们收集了20种不同环境声音的剪辑，包括滴水声、冰裂声、鲸鱼叫声和上面提及的铁锹声。他们将声音片段放给了58个本科生听......首先，单曲，（鲸叫声），然后，一系列不断增加重复的声音（鲸叫声重复）。

What they found is that…as the repeats stacked up…the participants rated the sounds as being more tuneful.

他们发现......随着声音不断的重复......参与者评价这些声音越来越悦耳。

The conclusion:

结论是：

“Repetition’s power to musicalize seems to extend to a broader variety of sounds than just speech.”Elizabeth Margulis, director of the music cognition lab at the University of Arkansas, who led the study.

领导此项研究的、阿肯色大学的音乐认知实验室负责人Elizabeth Margulis说，“重复的音乐化的力量似乎扩展到更广泛的声音，不仅仅是言语。”

“These perceptual transformations are powerful because nothing changes in the acoustic signal itself. That is held fixed. Everything that sounds different comes from the mind itself, making these illusions particularly useful for understanding the musical mode of listening. What are we doing when we’re hearing something musically? How is this different from other kinds of hearing? These transformations allow us to tackle these kinds of questions head on.”

“这些感知转换是非常强大的，因为声音信号本身没有任何变化。是固定的。所有听起来不同的东西都来自于思维本身，这使得这些幻想对于理解听觉的音乐模式特别有用。当我们听到一些东西音乐化时，我们在做什么呢？这与听到其他类型的东西又有什么不同呢？这些转变使我们能够直面这些问题。”

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“冰裂重复声又来了”