雅思阅读 129: What the Score Knows（配乐知道什么）

改编从 PMC / PNAS / Frontiers in Psychology（2025年）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11748619/

Reading Passage

A. A film score can do something no other art form quite manages: it tells you what to feel about a picture you have not yet fully seen. A single held string note over a quiet landscape turns it ominous; a sudden brass chord makes an ordinary door open frightening. Moviegoers rarely notice the music while it works, yet remove it and scenes collapse into ambiguity — a silent thriller becomes a documentary, a comedy loses its warmth. For over a century, composers and directors have exploited this power instinctively. Only in the last decade, however, has neuroscience begun to explain how a purely auditory sequence — no words, no images of its own — can so reliably direct the mind's interpretation of an unrelated visual scene. The answer is turning out to involve not just the brain's emotional centres but its visual cortices as well, and it suggests that film music works by reshaping perception at a very early stage of processing. What makes this surprising is that music is, by definition, a non-representational art: it has no pictures, no characters and no narrative of its own. Yet in the context of a film it functions as a kind of emotional grammar, translating visual ambiguity into unambiguous feeling in a fraction of a second.

B. The first clue came from a 2024 PNAS study on musical dissonance. Researchers played listeners sequences of chords that varied systematically in how dissonant they were — from smooth, consonant triads to clusters that felt grating — while scanning their brains. As expected, higher dissonance made listeners feel more negatively. What was unexpected was that the dissonant tones activated the primary visual cortex, the very area that first processes signals arriving from the eyes. Even though listeners were only hearing music, the brain's early visual machinery was being recruited. Further analysis showed stronger coupling between the auditory ventral stream and the visual cortex specifically during dissonant passages, as though the sound were sending a top-down signal that altered how subsequent images would be seen. Tonal dissonance, in other words, did not merely feel unpleasant; it primed the visual system to expect something aversive. Follow-up experiments in which viewers watched ambiguous film clips confirmed that the same neutral scene was judged as threatening when scored with dissonant music and as benign when scored with consonant music, even though the images themselves were identical.

C. A complementary study, published in 2025, asked what extra-musical meaning instrumental scores convey. Volunteers listened to short film cues and were asked to imagine what kind of scene, character or setting the music implied. The researchers decomposed the recordings into acoustic features — tempo, loudness, spectral brightness, harmonic complexity, dissonance — and mapped each feature to the kinds of images people imagined. They found that different features evoked largely non-overlapping pictures: low, soft, resonant passages suggested dim, enclosed interiors; fast, bright, dissonant ones suggested chaotic, threatening action. Crucially, negatively valenced emotions fully mediated the relationship between the acoustic features and the imagined scenes — meaning the music built its visual world through emotion first, and through emotion triggered specific mental imagery. The data demonstrated that music carries semantic information about places and people, even with no words at all. This finding has practical implications for film editors: if a composer knows which acoustic feature maps to which mental image, the score can be mixed or remixed after the picture is edited, and even an entirely new soundtrack can be expected to shift the audience's interpretation of the same scene in predictable ways.

D. The brain's reward system is also implicated. A 2025 combined PET-fMRI study showed that music people found pleasurable specifically activated cerebral μ-opioid receptors — the same chemical system that responds to pain relief and social bonding. Previously, opioid receptors had been associated mainly with basic biological rewards: eating, warmth, physical touch. The new finding suggested that aesthetic pleasure — the chills that run down the spine during a favourite film theme — recruits an evolutionarily ancient reward pathway ordinarily reserved for survival needs. A separate EEG study comparing happy and sad music videos found that sad soundtracks promoted mind-wandering, while happy ones sharpened attention; listeners under sad music showed increased activity in brain states linked to introspection and daydreaming, exactly the inward emotional state that a tragic film scene is designed to induce. This alignment between acoustic structure and cognitive state means that a film editor can deliberately steer the audience's attention inward or outward by choosing the right musical cue, before any dialogue is spoken.

E. Composers have, of course, known all this intuitively. The question the neuroscience now answers is why certain rules of orchestration work: minor modes and slow tempi produce tragic films because they engage semantic-processing regions — the middle temporal gyrus and angular gyrus — more strongly than major, upbeat music, as a 2025 Frontiers in Psychology study confirmed. Fast, percussive, harmonically simple music drives arousal; rich, sustained, harmonically complex music drives mood. Film scoring is less a decorative overlay than a perceptual intervention, tuning the audience's visual and emotional systems before the plot demands a reaction. Whether this power will be fully harnessed by generative AI systems — which can already compose in any style from a few descriptive cues — is now the open commercial question. The science suggests that an algorithm that understands acoustic features as precisely as it understands notes could score a scene as effectively as a human composer, and perhaps more cheaply. Whether audiences will know or care remains a separate matter. Early AI-generated film scores have already been used in independent productions and advertising, and the technology is advancing quickly enough that the question is no longer whether machines can compose competent pastiche but whether they can elicit the specific, nuanced emotional response that a skilled human conductor and orchestra bring to a major feature.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. Dissonance reaches into the visual cortex ii. What film music tells the brain about scenes iii. The opioid reward system and emotional states iv. Why old scoring rules work — and what comes next v. The history of silent film accompaniment vi. How the ear converts sound waves vii. The economics of film orchestras

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

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

5. What was unexpected about the PNAS dissonance study? A. Dissonant music made people happy. B. Dissonant chords activated the primary visual cortex. C. Consonant chords were unpopular. D. Music could not be heard during fMRI.

6. According to the 2025 study, how did music evoke imagined scenes? A. Through neutral memory alone. B. Through negatively valenced emotions mediating the effect. C. By playing words under the music. D. By synchronising with the audience's heartbeat.

7. What did the PET-fMRI study discover about pleasurable music? A. It activated μ-opioid receptors. B. It reduced heart rate. C. It damaged the auditory cortex. D. It had no effect on the brain.

8. What does the 2025 Frontiers in Psychology study say about tragic music? A. It is universally disliked. B. It activates semantic-processing regions more strongly than joyful music. C. It uses only major chords. D. It cannot be distinguished from joyful music.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Film music works by directing the mind's interpretation of visual scenes.
10. Consonant chords are more aversive than dissonant ones.
11. Sad music tends to promote mind-wandering.
12. The μ-opioid receptor system responds only to biological rewards like eating.
13. Generative AI currently composes more film music than human composers.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Film scores affect early visual processing because dissonant sounds activate the (14) __________ cortex via top-down coupling. Pleasurable music, meanwhile, activates the (15) __________ receptor system, normally associated with survival rewards.

答案与解析

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