Music: Language We All Speak Ielts Reading é›…ã¦â‚¬â

Music: Linguistic communication We All Speak

Section A - Music and language assorted

Music is ane of the homo species' relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training, whatsoever individual, from Rock Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability to recognise music 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 twenty-four hours, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so but in highly indirect means. Language, by contrast, is as well everywhere - simply for reasons that are more than obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can organise a migration beyond Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night fifty-fifty when you tin can't run into each other. Modern culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs direct from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax.

Scientists have e'er been intrigued past the connexion between music and language. Yet over the years, words and melody take acquired a vastly different status in the lab and the seminar room. While linguistic communication has long been considered essential to unlocking the mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as an evolutionary frippery - mere "auditory cheesecake", equally the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it.

Section B - Look back at some of the historical theories

But thank you to a decade-long moving ridge of neuroscience inquiry, that melody is irresolute. A flurry of recent publications suggests that linguistic communication and music may equally exist able to tell us who we are and where nosotros're from - not simply emotionally, but biologically. In July, the journal Nature Neuroscience devoted a special issue to the topic. And in an article in the 6 August issue of the Periodical of Neuroscience, David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke Academy argued that the sounds of music and the sounds of language are intricately connected.

To grasp the originality of this idea, information technology's necessary to realise 2 things about how music has traditionally been understood. Offset, musicologists have long emphasised that while each culture stamps a special identity onto its music, music itself has some universal qualities. For example, in virtually all cultures, sound is divided into some or all of the 12 intervals that make up the chromatic calibration -that is, the scale represented past the keys on a piano. For centuries, observers take attributed this preference for certain combinations of tones to the mathematical properties of sound itself.

Some 2,500 years agone, Pythagoras was the first to annotation a direct relationship betwixt the harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced information technology. For example, a plucked string will ever play an octave lower than a similar string half its size, and a 5th lower than a similar cord two thirds its length. This link between simple ratios and harmony has influenced music theory always since.

Section C - Current research on music

This music-is-math thought is often accompanied past the notion that music, formally speaking at least, exists apart from the world in which information technology was created. Writing recently in The New York Review of Books, pianist and critic Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notion that while painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of the natural globe, and writing describes thoughts and feelings we are all familiar with, music is entirely bathetic from the globe in which we live. Neither thought is correct, co-ordinate to David Schwartz and his colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped non by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of existent life, and of speech in item – which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage. "The explanation of music, like the explanation of any production of the mind, must be rooted in biology, non in numbers per se," says Schwartz.

Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analysed a vast option of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sounds, they discarded all theories virtually speech and meaning, and sliced 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 discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In brusk, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech.

Far from being abstract, music presents a foreign analogue to the patterns created by the sounds of speech. "Music, like visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world," says Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear the echo of our bones sound-making musical instrument - the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler nevertheless than Pythagoras'due south mathematical equations: We similar the sounds that are familiar to united states - specifically, we like the sounds that remind united states of the states.

This brings up some chicken-or-egg evolutionary questions. Information technology may exist that music imitates speech directly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that language evolved first. It's also conceivable that music came first and language is in consequence an imitation of song - that in everyday oral communication we hit the musical notes we especially like. Alternately, it may be that music imitates the general products of the human sound-making system, which but happens to be more often than not speech. "We can't know this," says Schwartz. "What nosotros exercise know is that they both come from the same system, and information technology is this that shapes our preferences."

Section D - Communication in music with animals

Schwartz's study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals sympathise or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in the natural world - birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronised chimpanzee hooting - previous studies have institute that many laboratory animals don't show a bully affinity for the homo variety of music making.

Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don't create or perceive music the way we exercise. The fact that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of man tunes is testify, they say, of shared general features of the auditory organisation, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. Equally for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognise their own tunes - a narrow repertoire - but don't generate novel melodies like nosotros do. There are no avian Mozarts.

 But what'due south been played to animals, Schwartz notes, is human being music. If animals evolve preferences for audio equally nosotros do - based upon the soundscape in which they alive - then their "music" would exist fundamentally unlike from ours. In the same way our scales derive from human utterances, a cat'south idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sound the manner nosotros do, nosotros'd need evidence that they don't respond to "music" synthetic from their own sound surroundings.

Section East - Are we genetically designed for music?

No matter how the connection betwixt language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is every bit securely rooted in our biological science 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 communication are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to "regulate infants' emotional states", Trehub says. Regardless of what linguistic communication they speak, the voice all mothers utilise with babies is the aforementioned: "something between speech and song". This kind of advice "puts the baby in a trancelike land, which may proceed to sleep or extended periods of rapture". So if the babies of the world could understand the latest inquiry on linguistic communication and music, they probably wouldn't be very surprised. The upshot, says , is that music may be even more than of a necessity than nosotros realise.

Questions 1-v

Reading Passage has five sections A-Due east.

Choose the right heading for each section from the listing of headings below.

Write the correct number i-viii in boxes one-5 on your respond sheet.

1 Section A
Reply: three    Locate

2 Department B
Answer: vii    Locate

3 Section C
Answer: 4    Locate

4 Section D
Respond: i    Locate

v Section E
Respond: viii    Locate

List of Headings

i. Advice in music with animals

ii. New discoveries on animal music

3. Music and language contrasted

iv. Electric current research on music

5. Music is beneficial for infants.

vi. Music transcends cultures.

vii. Wait back at some of the historical theories

viii. Are we genetically designed for music?

Questions 6-12

Look at the following people (Questions 6-12) and the list of statements below.

Match each person with the correct statement.

Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 6-12 on your answer sheet.

6 Steven Pinker
Respond: F    Locate

7 Musicologists
Answer: B    Locate

viii Greek philosopher Pythagoras
Answer: E    Locate

9 Schwartz, Howe, and Purves
Answer: D    Locate

10 Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott
Answer: G    Locate

xi Charles Rosen
Respond: A    Locate

12 Sandra Trehub
Reply: C    Locate

Listing of Statements

A Music exists outside of the globe it is created in.

B Music has a universal character despite cultural influences on it.

C Music is a necessity for humans.

D Music preference is related to the surrounding influences.

E He discovered the mathematical basis of music.

F Music doesn't relish the same status of research involvement as language.

G Humans and monkeys have similar traits in perceiving sound.

Questions 13-14

Choose the right letter A, B, C or D.

Write your answers in boxes 13-fourteen on your reply sheet.

13 Why was the report of animal music inconclusive?

A Animals don't have the same auditory system as humans.

B Tests on fauna music are express.

C Animals can't make upward new tunes.

D There aren't enough tests on a wide range of animals.
Reply: C    Locate

14 What is the main theme of this passage?

A Language and learning

B The evolution of music

C The role of music in human guild

D Music for animals
Respond: C

martinezpeartrut1958.blogspot.com

Source: https://mini-ielts.com/1057/view-solution/reading/music-language-we-all-speak

Share this post