Michigan State University, USA.
Chinese University of Hong Kong, China.
Cognition. 2021 Jul;212:104712. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104712. Epub 2021 Apr 10.
Music has attracted longstanding debate surrounding its capacity to communicate without words, but little empirical work has addressed the topic. Here, 534 participants in the US and a remote region of China participated in two experiments using a novel paradigm to investigate narrative perceptions as a semantic dimension of music. Participants listened to wordless musical excerpts and determined which of two presented stories was the correct match. Correct matches were stories previously imagined by individuals from the US or China in response to each of the excerpts, while foils were correct matches to one of the other tested excerpts. Results revealed that listeners from Arkansas and Michigan had no difficulty matching the music with stories generated by Arkansas listeners. Wordless music, then, far from an abstract stimulus, seems to engender shared, concrete narrative perceptions in listeners. These perceptions are stable and robust for within-culture participants, even at geographically distinct locales (e.g. Arkansas and Michigan). This finding refutes the notion that music is an asemantic medium. In contrast, participants in both the US and China had more difficulty determining correct story-music matches for stories generated by participants from another culture, suggesting that a sufficiently shared pool of experiences must exist for strong intersubjectivity to arise.
音乐在无需语言的情况下进行交流的能力一直存在争议，但很少有实证研究涉及这个话题。在这里，来自美国和中国偏远地区的 534 名参与者参与了两项实验，使用一种新颖的范式来研究叙事感知作为音乐的语义维度。参与者聆听无歌词的音乐片段，并确定两个呈现的故事中哪一个是正确的匹配。正确的匹配是之前来自美国或中国的个人针对每个片段想象的故事，而错误的匹配则是与其他测试片段之一正确匹配的故事。结果表明，来自阿肯色州和密歇根州的听众毫不费力地将音乐与阿肯色州听众创作的故事相匹配。因此，无歌词的音乐远非一种抽象的刺激，它似乎在听众中产生了共同的、具体的叙事感知。这些感知对于同一文化的参与者来说是稳定和强大的，即使在地理位置不同的地方（例如阿肯色州和密歇根州）也是如此。这一发现驳斥了音乐是一种非语义媒介的观点。相比之下，来自美国和中国的参与者在确定来自另一种文化的参与者创作的故事与音乐的正确匹配方面遇到了更多困难，这表明必须存在足够共享的经验池，才能产生强烈的主体间性。
