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Nothing better than the real thing
真东西才是最好的
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. Yet, the live gig lives on. People still fill sweaty basements, muddy fields and gilded concert halls to hear their favourite musicians play.
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。然而现场演出仍在继续。人们仍然挤在闷热的地下室、泥泞的田野和金碧辉煌的音乐厅里，听他们最喜欢的音乐人演奏。
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.
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。音乐会是一种沉浸式的社交体验，人们通过渐强的音乐、音调的变化和下降一起聆听和感受音乐。
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.
音乐会也是动态的，艺术家可以根据观众的反应来调整演奏。正是因为后一种差异，苏黎世大学和奥斯陆大学的神经科学家们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. The pianist was shown the participant’s real-time brain activity as a form of feedback.
在“现场演奏”实验中，受试者躺在核磁共振扫描仪上，通过耳机听音乐，而钢琴师被安置在房间外面。受试者的实时大脑活动会作为一种反馈展现给钢琴师看。
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.
在“录制音乐”的条件下，受试者听到预先录制的相同曲目。现场音乐如何对大脑中处理情绪的区域产生影响，这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.
在现场演奏实验中，钢琴师被指示要调整他们的演奏，以调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《美国国家科学院公报》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.
无论音乐是快乐的还是悲伤的，听钢琴师以动态的方式演奏在杏仁核和其他处理情绪的区域产生了更多活动。
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，在现场演奏中，受试者的大脑活动对音乐的节奏和音调等声音特征追踪得更紧密。
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.
这项研究远没有再现出演唱会的真实体验，研究者们指出，现场音乐最终听起来与录制曲目完全不同，这可能导致受试者的大脑活动出现了一些差异。
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的反应改变演奏方式，这可能是现场音乐有独特魅力的一个原因。
