Why does music make us feel? 为什么音乐能让我们有所感觉？ On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. 一方面，音乐是纯粹抽象的艺术形式，没有语言或明确的想法。 And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deeply. 然而，尽管音乐说得很少，但仍然深深地触及我们。 When listening to our favourite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. 听着我们最喜欢的歌曲，我们的身体背叛了所有的情绪唤起的症状。 The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. 我们眼中的瞳孔膨胀，我们的脉搏和血压升高，我们皮肤的电导率降低，与身体运动相关的大脑区域变得异常活跃。 Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. 血液甚至重新指向我们腿部的肌肉。 In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. 换句话说，声音激起了我们的生物根源。

A recent paper in Nature Neuroscience by a research team in Montreal, Canada, marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of ‘the potent pleasurable stimulus' that is music. 加拿大蒙特利尔一个研究小组最近在“自然神经科学”上发表的论文标志着揭示音乐是“有力并且快乐的刺激”的明确基础的重要一步。 Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. 虽然这项研究涉及大量奇特的技术，包括功能磁共振成像（FMRI）和基于配体的正电子发射断层扫描（PET），但实验本身是相当简单的。 After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people who experience ‘chills' to instrumental music, the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. 筛选了217位响应广告的人之后，经历了“寒战”的工具音乐，科学家将主题库缩小到十个。 They then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favourite songs - virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango - and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored. 然后，他们要求受试者将他们喜爱的歌曲的播放列表（几乎每个类型都从techno到探戈）都表现出来，并在播放音乐时监控他们的大脑活动。 Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI), they were able to obtain an impressively exact and detailed portrait of music in the brain. 由于科学家们正在组合方法（PET和fMRI），他们能够在大脑中获得令人印象深刻的精确和详细的音乐肖像。 The first thing they discovered is that music triggers the production of dopamine - a chemical with a key role in setting people's moods - by the neurons (nerve cells) in both the dorsal and ventral regions of the brain. 他们发现的第一件事是，音乐触发大脑背部和腹部区域神经元（神经细胞）生产多巴胺，这种化学物质是调节人们心情的重要角色。 As these two regions have long been linked with the experience of pleasure, this finding isn't particularly surprising. 由于这两个地区早已与快乐的经历相联系，这一发现并不是特别令人惊讶。

What is rather more significant is the finding that the dopamine neurons in the caudate - a region of the brain involved in learning stimulus-response associations, and in anticipating food and other ‘reward' stimuli - were at their most active around 15 seconds before the participants' favourite moments in the music. 更重要的是在尾状核中发现了多巴胺神经元–尾状核是参与学习刺激反应关联的大脑区域，以及预测食物和其他“奖励”刺激物 – 在参与者最喜欢的音乐出现之前的大约15秒最活跃。 The researchers call this the ‘anticipatory phase'； and argue that the purpose of this activity is to help us predict the arrival of our favourite part. 研究人员称之为“预期阶段”，并认为这一活动的目的是帮助我们预测我们最喜欢的部分的到来。 The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to. 当然，问题是所有的这些多巴胺神经元取决于什么。 Why are they so active in the period preceding the acoustic climax? 为什么他们在声音高潮之前的时期如此活跃？ After all, we typically associate surges of dopamine with pleasure, with the processing of actual rewards. 毕竟，我们通常将多巴胺的激动与快乐相关联，并处理实际的奖励。 And yet, this cluster of cells is most active when the ‘chills' have yet to arrive, when the melodic pattern is still unresolved. 然而，当“寒战”尚未到达时，这种旋律模式尚未得到解决，这个细胞群是最活跃的。

One way to answer the question is to look at the music and not the neurons. 回答这个问题的一个方法是看音乐而不是看神经元。 While music can often seem (at least to the outsider) like a labyrinth of intricate patterns, it turns out that the most important part of every song or symphony is when the patterns break down, when the sound becomes unpredictable. 虽然音乐通常似乎（至少是局外人）像一个迷宫般的模式，但事实证明，每个歌曲或交响乐最重要的部分是当模式分解时，声音会变得不可预测。 If the music is too obvious, it is annoyingly boring, like an alarm clock. 如果音乐太明显，那就像一个闹钟一样无聊。 Numerous studies, after all, have demonstrated that dopamine neurons quickly adapt to predictable rewards. 毕竟，许多研究已经证明多巴胺神经元能够快速适应可预测的回报。 If we know what’s going to happen next, then we don’t get excited. 如果我们知道下一步会发生什么，那我们就不会兴奋。 This is why composers often introduce a key note in the beginning of a song, spend most of the rest of the piece in the studious avoidance of the pattern, and then finally repeat it only at the end. 这就是为什么作曲家经常在一首歌曲的开头引入一个关键音符，花费剩下大部分时间来避免这种模式，然后只在结尾再重复一遍。 The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. 我们没有得到我们所期望的模式的时间越长，当这种模式再次安然无恙地出现的时候，我们的情绪释放的越大。

To demonstrate this psychological principle, the musicologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analysed the 5th movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. 为了演示这种心理原理，音乐学家Leonard Meyer在他的经典著作“情感与音乐意义”中分析了贝多芬升C小调弦乐四重奏作品中的第5乐章。 Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with - but not submission to - our expectations of order. Meyer想要展示给人们音乐是怎样以调戏我们，不按照我们期望的顺序去排列的。 Meyer dissected 50 measures (bars) of the masterpiece, showing how Beethoven begins with the clear statement of a rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then, in an ingenious tonal dance, carefully holds off repeating it. Meyer把这一巨作分了50组，展示了贝多芬是怎样用一个优美和谐的节奏型叙述一个清晰的开篇，然后以灵动的调性舞曲，精心的将重复延迟。 What Beethoven does instead is suggest variations of the pattern. 贝多芬做的是暗示音乐的变奏曲。 He wants to preserve an element of uncertainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. 他想要保留自己音乐中少许的不确定，使得我们的大脑祈求得到想要的和弦，可是他又不给我们听。 Beethoven saves that chord for the end. 贝多芬把这个和弦留在了最后。

According to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music, arising out of our unfulfilled expectations, that is the source of the music's feeling. 按照Meyer的想法，音乐的焦虑不安（起于没得到满足的期望）是乐感的来源。 While earlier theories of music focused on the way a sound can refer to the real world of images and experiences - its ‘ connotative' meaning - Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself. 然而早起音乐的理论专注于方式，这种方式表明声音可以适用于真实世界的图像和经历，也就是内涵意义，但是Meyer觉得我们在音乐中发现的情感来自于音乐本身展示的事件。 This ‘embodied meaning’ arises from the patterns the symphony invokes and then ignores. 这种精神寓意起因于交响乐唤起和忽略的模式。 It is this uncertainty that triggers the surge of dopamine in the caudate, as we struggle to figure out what will happen next. 当我们努力去想出接下来会发生什么的时候，这种不确定性激发了多巴胺的释放。 We can predict some of the notes, but we can't predict them all, and that is what keeps us listening, waiting expectantly for our reward, for the pattern to be completed. 我们可以预测乐章的一部分，但是不能预测所有，而且这使得我们耐心倾听，满怀期待地等待我们的报偿，直到结束。