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Science and technology
科技
Neuroscience
神经科学
Nothing better than the real thing.
实时的东西是最好的。
Why recorded music will never feel as good as being at a concert?
为什么录制的音乐永远没有音乐会体验好？
In a world of music streaming services, access to almost any song is just a few clicks away.
在音乐流媒体服务的世界里，只需点击几下鼠标就能听到几乎所有的歌曲。
Yet, the live gig lives on.
然而现场演出仍在继续。
People still fill sweaty basements, muddy fields and gilded concert halls to hear their favourite musicians play.
人们仍然挤在闷热的地下室，泥泞的田野和镀金的音乐厅里，听他们最喜欢的音乐家演奏。
And now neuroscientists might know why: live music engages the brain’s emotion centres more than its recorded counterpart.
现在神经科学家可能知道了这一现象的原因：现场音乐比录制音乐更能调动大脑的情绪中枢。
Concerts are immersive social experiences in which people listen to and feel the music together through crescendos, key changes and drops.
音乐会是一种沉浸式的社交体验，人们通过渐强、音调变化和下降来共同聆听和感受音乐。
They are also dynamic—artists can adapt their playing according to the crowd’s reaction.
它们也是动态的，艺术家可以根据群众反应来调整演奏。
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.
正是因为这最后一种差异，苏黎世大学和奥斯陆大学的神经科学家们才开始研究人们听音乐时大脑的反应。
In the “live” experiment, participants lay in an mri scanner listening to the music through earphones, while a pianist was positioned outside the room.
在现场演奏中，受试者躺在核磁共振扫描仪中，通过耳机听音乐，而钢琴家被安置在房间外面。
The pianist was shown the participant’s real-time brain activity as a form of feedback.
受试者的实时大脑活动会反馈给钢琴家。
In the recorded condition, participants listened to pre-recorded versions of the same tunes.
在“录制音乐”实验中，受试者会听到预先录制的相同曲目。
The scientists were interested in how live music affected the areas of the brain that process emotions.
现场音乐对大脑中处理情绪的区域所产生的影响让科学家们很感兴趣。
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.
在现场环境下，钢琴家被指示尝试调整他们的演奏，以驱动这些区域里的杏仁核的活动，杏仁核是大脑深处一个杏仁形的区域。
The results, just published in the journal pnas, showed that live music had far more emotional impact.
刚刚发表在《美国科学院院报》上的研究结果表明，现场音乐对情感的影响要大得多。
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.
无论音乐是快乐还是悲伤，听钢琴家现场演奏会在杏仁核和处理情绪的其他部分产生更多活动。
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.
研究人员还发现，受试者的大脑活动追踪音乐的节奏和音调等声学特征，在现场播放时要紧密得多。
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.
这项研究远没有复刻演出的真实体验，作者指出，现场音乐最终听起来与录制曲目完全不同，可能导致参与者大脑活动的一些差异。
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.
但研究结果表明，艺术家能够根据观众喜好改变演奏方式，可能是现场音乐与众不同的一个原因。
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.
一些音乐表演现在试图重现实时的演出体验，但除了艺术家之外，瑞典虚拟乐队abba Voyage是一场互动式、沉浸式的表演，完全由预先录制的全息图像化身表演。
But without Benny’s ability to read the mood of the room, it will never quite match the real thing.
但如果没有本尼解读房间气氛的能力，它永远无法与实时的表演媲美。
