音乐的深远起源与超越人类的普适性
利物浦大学的音乐教授迈克尔·斯皮策（Michael Spitzer）在介绍其著作《音乐人类：地球生命史》时指出，他撰写此书的灵感源于尤瓦尔·赫拉利（Yuval Harari）的《人类简史》。斯皮策教授认为，音乐的起源远比人类（Sapiens）早了至少一百万年，甚至在动物界也普遍存在，例如鸟类和鲸鱼的鸣唱。这表明音乐具有超越物种的普适性，人类本质上也是一种音乐动物（Musical Animal: 能够创作、欣赏和理解音乐的生物）。
然而，探究音乐的史前阶段面临诸多挑战。由于爱迪生发明留声机之前没有声音记录，且许多早期乐器如木制、皮革或弦乐器使用的材料易于生物降解，因此很难找到直接证据。我们主要依赖那些不易腐烂的石器乐器（Lithic Instruments: 由石头制成的打击或发声工具）来追溯历史，比如用钟乳石制作的打击乐器，或是坦桑尼亚著名的石磬。这些发现为我们提供了关于音乐如何在人类文明早期发挥作用的线索。
Original English Source
I'm Michael Spitzer. I'm professor of music at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. I've written a book called The Musical Human: The History of Life on Earth. >> Chapter 1, the history of music. >> People often write books in response to reading other books. And when I read Yuval Harari Sapiens, which blew my mind, I thought, well, hold on. Music is at least a million years older than sapiens. And most books about music do the usual thing of which composer wrote what piece at what time. And I wanted to get away from that and see the bigger picture. We're in a kind of moment of um thinking of the the global of the universal and music is absolutely universal. It also transcends sapiens because animals have music. birds and whales and other creatures and ultimately the musical human is a musical animal. It's almost inconceivable to write a prehistory of music because Edison invents the phonograph and prior to that we have no record of any sound. One of the problems with instruments is that the materials biodegrade. Um but looking as far back as we can, what doesn't degrade um are lithic instruments made of rocks such as stallctites or the famous rock gongs in Tanzania.早期乐器与推断法重建音乐史前图景
在可考证的早期乐器中，最显著的里程碑是南德洞穴中发现的距今约四万年前的骨笛（Bone Flutes: 由动物骨骼制成的管状乐器），它们由秃鹫骨骼制成。随后，随着陶器的发明，人们开始利用陶瓷和动物皮革制作框鼓（Frame Drums: 由框和拉紧的膜组成，用手或槌击打的鼓）；农业兴起后，通过扭转动物内脏制成弦线，才出现了弦乐器（String Instruments: 通过弦的振动发声的乐器），如竖琴和琉特琴。然而，皮革和弦线等有机材料的生物降解特性，使得这些乐器的确切起源难以考证。
因此，要重建音乐的史前图景，我们必须依赖推断法（Inferential Reasoning: 结合现有证据进行逻辑推理的方法）。这需要整合多个学科的知识，包括对解剖学、工具技术演变、语言学逆向工程以及全球狩猎采集社会日常生活的观察。斯皮策教授举例说明：约150万年前，直立人（Homo Erectus）发明了双面石斧（Bifacial Axe: 具有对称双面的石制工具）。这种在石斧上创造对称美的能力，不仅体现了对美学的追求，也暗示了跨模态心智能力（Cross-modal Mental Capacity: 在不同感官领域之间迁移和应用心智处理能力），即大脑处理对称性的能力可以从工具领域延伸到声音领域。因此，可以合理推断直立人能够以对称的节奏（Meter or Regular Rhythm: 音乐中重复出现的规律性节拍）敲击石斧，这便是音乐节律的早期萌芽。
Original English Source
The absolute landmark are the bone flutes discovered in the South German caves about 40,000 years old and they were constructed from the bones of a griffin vulture. But other than that we have to wait until um the invention of ceramics um on over which people stretched high to create the first frame drums. But of course skin and leather um biodegrades and we have no evidence for exactly when these were were made and even more so for strings. So the first string instruments harps and loots were created after the invention of farming once people farmed cows and created strings from twisting the guts of of animals. So we create harps and loots but again um strings biodegrade. So we have to work inferentially by mapping from what we do know and looking at say um the prehistory of anatomy of the evolving technology of tools reverse engineering from linguistics to model language and observing everyday life in across the world in huntergatherer societies in different environments. It's um as much about piecing together a number of disciplines. And here is here's an example of an inferential argument. About 1.5 million years ago, Homo Air, one of our homminin ancestors, invents what is called a bfacial axe. This is an axe with two symmetrical faces. Now, the the capacity to create symmetry in an axe bespeaks um two things. um an ability to create um a beautiful form, a symmetry and an enjoyment of form for aesthetic reasons. We can also borrow from psychology to create an inference that you can map from the domain of tools to the domain of sound because um mental capacity is crossodal. So the uh ability to to create symmetry is also found in sound and we call symmetrical sound meter or regular rhythm. So it's a fair argument that uh given the evidence of a bfacial handax homoastaster would have been able to tap that axe in a symmetrical rhythm or using musical meter.双足行走与声音冗余：人类音乐的演化基石
谈及音乐的起源，双足行走（Bipedalism: 人类祖先用双腿直立行走的能力）被视为一个关键的进化元素。约440万年前，南方古猿（Ardipithecus）开始直立行走，此后行走节奏便深刻地印刻在人类音乐之中。这种早期步伐不仅在大脑、肌肉劳作与声音之间建立了联系，也使人类学会将脚步声识别为一种模式，从而产生时间感和预测能力。行走还赋予了人类对“音乐律动”的痴迷，尽管音乐本身并非真正移动，我们却想象音符在空间中流淌，并将其体验为一场从起点到终点的旅程，这或许是人类祖先“走出非洲”漫长旅程的遥远回响。
随着双足行走带来的进化级联效应，人类的颅骨容量增至三倍，智力显著提升。大脑对手指的控制力增强，使其变得更加灵巧，最终得以制作和演奏骨笛。同时，直立姿态也为呼吸提供了更大的空间，喉头下移，舌骨（Hyoid Bone）进化，使我们能够清晰地发出和演唱。随着声道（Vocal Tract）学会产生无限多样的声音，人类发声能力超出了其功能性需求。相较于非洲疣猴仅有的四种捕食者警告叫声，人类能够产生上千种声音，这种声音冗余（Excess of Sounds: 指发声能力远超基本生存沟通所需，从而为音乐创造了可能）为音乐的诞生创造了条件。当人类开始仅仅为了享受声音而玩弄声音时，音乐便脱离了动物的叫声和功能性发声。
Original English Source
When we talk about the origin of music, um it's really um about assembling elements of music which were synthesized much further down the road. And one of these elements was bipedalism. That what marks um the first hominins apart from um apes and our common ancestor was getting up on our feet. 4.4 And 4 million years ago, an oralopythesine called AI stood on her legs and walked. And ever since then, the rhythm of walking has stamped human music. But much more than that, that pun intended, that the first steps put us on the path to forging links between the brain and muscular exertion and sound. And the homminins learn to to hear footsteps as a pattern. And what patterns give you is a sense of time. You can predict what will happen next. And um the idea of walking um also gives humans a fascination with this metaphor that music moves. And if you think about it, music does not move. Uh music is just sounds or tones floating through the air. But we imagine that one note moves to the other. And most of music, be it a a symphony or a or or a a song, um unfolds a journey. And this journey takes us uh from one point to another in in a in our minds. It's an imaginary journey um a very long-distant echo from uh the journey of our ancestors out of Africa. But um walking is the first step of a whole uh uh cascade of evolutionary adaptations and so many things evolve. Our cranial um volume triples in size. We become a lot smarter and with um our increased brain size comes a capacity to control our fingers to make links with um the motor domains of our brain. they become more dextrous and ultimately more capable of crafting flutes and and playing them. But standing up also um uh gives gives us more space to breathe and our um larynx descends through our vocal tract. Our hyoid bone which supports our tongue evolves so we can articulate what we sing. As our um vocal tract um learned how to produce um an infinitely greater variety of sounds um our capacity to make sounds exceeded their function. If you compare us with say the verd monkey, they can make four kinds of calls and each call um uh warns um other monkeys of a particular kind of prey. But when you can produce a thousand kinds of sounds, there's an excess of sounds. And this is where music starts to become a possibility where you're playing with sound. You're enjoying sound for sound's sake, no longer having a function. And at this point, I think that human music steps away from animal vocalization or animal calls.音乐作为记忆的载体与建筑的共鸣
斯皮策教授认为，音乐与记忆（Memory: 存储和回忆经验的能力）和历史（History: 对过去事件的记录和研究）紧密相连。他举例说，两百万年前父亲教导儿子如何敲击石头制器，这种知识的传递成为一种凝固的肌肉记忆（Congealed Muscle Memory: 通过重复实践而非认知理解获得的技能，类似于道金斯所说的模因），并通过骨笛上的刻线和指孔得以传承，这本身就是一种记忆的形式。
在世界各地的文化中，音乐常被视为解释自身起源的方式。巴布亚新几内亚的库利部落（Kuli Tribe: 巴布亚新几内亚的一个土著部落）相信音乐源自“金钱鸟”（一种果鸠），他们模仿这种鸟的叫声，以此参与到生命的循环中，唱诵祖先的歌曲，这构成了他们的记录史（Recorded History: 通过口头或书面形式记录和传承的历史）。西方文化中，贝多芬的《英雄交响曲》也承载着对拿破仑时代战争记忆的排练。
此外，音乐与建筑（Architecture: 建筑物的结构和设计）之间存在天然的共鸣。早期骨笛的碎片在洞穴中最大共振点被发现，暗示了音乐、声音、声学和建筑之间的自然结合。这在西方文化中也有体现，教堂本质上是用于崇拜的“洞穴”，其圣歌与建筑声学之间存在天然的亲和力。在洞穴中，音乐和仪式可能用于特殊的场合，利用其惊人的回声效果，通过骨笛、人声或敲击钟乳石来创造神秘的氛围。
Original English Source
One of the uh I think profound messages which I discovered in writing my book was that music is all about memory and and history. When somebody um two million years ago teaches their son how to nap a rock, their son remembers that. And tradition is I call it um um congealed muscle memory. Um learning how to to do something is a haptic. It's a meme, as Dawkins would say. It's mimemetic. Not necessarily um cognitive. Your muscles learn how to do it. And then you get the bone flutes and you have little parallel lines insized on the flute which tell you where to place your fingers. Indeed, the five holes on those flutes tell you how to play it. That's also a memory. Um, most cultures across the planet um, uh, see music as a way of explaining um, where their music came from. Here's an example. Um, the Kuli tribe of New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, they believe in their belief system that music comes from the mooney bird, a kind of fruit dove. And they believe that the birds hovering above the forest canopy are literally their ancestors speaking to them. And in imitating the call of the dove, they're participating in the great circle of life. They're singing back their ancestors songs. And that is recorded history. in the west. An example of that is a Beethoven symphony like the heroica which rehearses a memory of what it's like to live under Napoleon and fight a battle in 19th century France. So all music uh be it in the west or across the planet or going back millions of years ago is very intimately connected to memory and to history. When we discovered the first bone flute, some of the shards of the broken flute were discovered in points of maximum resonance within the caves, suggesting a natural um marriage, if you'd like, between music and sound and acoustics and architecture. And that also obtains um you know, in the west it's no accident that a church is essentially a cave to worship a god. and the natural affinity between plain chant, singing in in church and the acoustics, the resonance of that. So music goes together with architecture. In the caves, it's very likely that they were reserved for um rituals. Nobody wants to live in a cave. Um, so these were dark and and and um possibly dangerous places full of mystery, portals to the divine, the layers of of savage beasts and uh they would be reserved for special ceremonies or rituals um utilizing the astonishing resonance that the cave uh the stone affords to the flutes or the human voice or or banging stallctites.狩猎采集社会的音乐生态与功能转变
人类学家通过观察不同环境下（从沙漠到冰帽）的现代狩猎采集社会，可以推断史前音乐的核心特征。这些社会的一个共同点是人类与动物和景观的共生关系（Entanglement: 生物之间或生物与环境之间紧密相互联系的状态）。许多歌曲模仿动物的叫声或舞蹈，如澳大利亚原住民模仿鸟类和袋鼠，伊努伊特人模仿海豹幼崽的声音以捕猎。这种动物模仿（Animal Mimicry: 模仿动物声音或行为以达成某种目的）不仅是生存策略，也是他们起源故事的一部分。
澳大利亚原住民的歌线（Songlines: 原住民通过歌曲描述和导航景观的传统）展现了他们与地理环境的深层连接，将每一处地貌特征与歌曲绑定，并通过萨满教的灵魂之旅（Spirit Journey: 萨满教中通过特定仪式进入非物质世界寻求指引的体验）将音乐视为通往祖先“梦境”的翅膀。然而，在北美的伊努伊特人社会，由于冰雪环境难以留下足迹，他们的导航更多依赖心智地图，这促进了超出现实足迹的文化网络（Culture Superseding Footsteps: 描述文化、记忆和心智导航系统超越物理痕迹对生存的重要性）。
此外，极地严酷的环境使得伊努伊特人必须在狭小的冰屋空间中共同生活，因此音乐在其中扮演了重要的冲突管理（Conflict Management: 通过艺术形式协调社会关系，避免矛盾激化的策略）角色。他们的歌曲充满欢笑和玩笑，通过嬉戏的社交性（Playful Sociability: 通过幽默和玩乐来促进社会和谐与团结的方式）来化解潜在冲突。这与狩猎采集者普遍存在的即兴性（Improvisational: 音乐在表演时灵活变化，不拘泥于固定形式的特点）和避免重复（Avoiding Repetition: 倾向于创造性的即兴而非机械地重复固定作品）的音乐特点相符，例如喀麦隆俾格米人每次演奏同一曲目都会有不同版本，体现了当下音乐（Music of the Moment: 强调音乐创作和表演的即时性、灵活性，而非固定作品的概念）的特性。
Original English Source
Now the caveat is that of course we cannot go back in time a million years. Everything we we say has huge scare quotes on it. But that said, it's very striking that looking at the spread of huntergatherer peoples across different environments from deserts to savas to rainforest to the polar snow caps, they share a core and that survival of a core bespeak something essential. So it's more than a high-end parable. So if you compare say peoples as different as the Aboriginal peoples of Australia with the Inuit of North America, what they share is an entanglement of humanity with animals. In some ways the purpose of music is to tell us an origin story of where we came from and we came from animals. And so much of their songs imitates the calls of animals or the the dancing of animals. Darwin himself when he observes the karabbery samurai in Australia, he saw that the Aboriginal peoples imitated the the dance of kiwis and um kangaroos. And if you look at the way that Inuit imitate the sound of a um seal cub in their songs to lure the cub to be trapped and to be and and to and to be hunted. It's similar looking at the Native Americans and imitate the call of a buffalo cub. So in each context um modern hunter gatherers are imitating the calls of animals. But not just that, the way they think of themselves as entangled also with the landscape. Um, we have the very famous song lines that Bruce Chatwin observed in the way that Aboriginal peoples of of Australia as they journey through or sail through the desert, they tag each feature of the landscape with a song and they navigate the landscape in terms of song and they view music as a a sort of um shamanistic uh spirit journey where led by the shaman um music is a it gives you wings. It enables you to fly through layers of the cosmos and ultimately to what they call the dreamland of their ancestors. Now, if you compare um the different environments that the sand of Australia is very different from the snow of um of North America and in a certain sense we can extrapolate back to the conditions obtaining 40,000 years ago in the ice age. The thing about snow compared to sand, it leaves no footprints. It leaves no traces. It's very hard to navigate snow. And so you can extrapolate from that and make and and make the um the inference that Inuit um navigate trails in their mind and much less um footsteps through through the snow. and you begin to imagine a web of culture um superseding the web of footsteps or with the web of trails in the landscape. Snow is al also much more enimical to human survival than sand. Um and uh the inuit have to learn to live with each other with enclosed spaces of egloos. So music's function is really about um anger or conflict management. Um, you can't afford to have a fight if you're dependent upon one another in a small space in the middle of a polar ice gap. Which is why so much of Inuward music is full of laughter and jokes. And you see that in the lyrics of Inuit songs. It's it's fostering um a playful sociability and diffusing potential for for conflict. If you're looking at the broad picture, the wide angle lens picture of the evolution of sapiens, then the epochs are hunter gatherer, sedentary or farming community and then the founding of cities and city states. And usually these epochs is associated with mentalities. So hunter gatherers tended to be nomadic and we can see that in examples of huntergatherer peoples across the whole world from the Inuit in North America, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, the pygmies in Africa. Um and they they share um a nomadic uh way of life and if you're essentially journeying through a landscape, what you don't do is carry heavy instruments. Uh music has to be portable. ideally just a voice or if not the a very light flute or a small percussive instrument. We also see um in music of the moment um is that music tends to be very playful avoiding repetition. So the idea of a of a piece or a work which which could be repeated was a very modern notion. And if you look at the music that is played by by the Cameroon Pygmies, every time they play a piece, it sounds different. It's very much music of the moment.农业文明与城市兴起如何重塑音乐
随着农业和定居生活的到来，人类思维模式转向季节循环（Seasonal Cycles: 自然界中周期性变化的规律，如作物生长、四季更迭）和生命周期（Life Cycle: 生物从出生、成长到死亡的整个过程），音乐也随之“扎根”并固定化（Fixed: 指音乐形式和结构变得更为稳定，可重复）。这催生了为生命和季节的每个阶段创作的音乐作品，并发展出可重复的作品概念（Repeatable Work: 音乐作品具有固定形式，可以被反复演奏和传播），其结构像生命本身一样循环往复。
当音乐从农田进入城镇，其功能也随之发生转变。由于定居性增强，乐器可以变得沉重（Heavy Instruments: 大型且不易携带的乐器），如钟和锣，但也出现了脆弱的竖琴和琉特琴等。随着社会阶层的形成，音乐的功能开始服务于权力（Serve Power: 音乐作为政治、宗教权威的工具，用于巩固统治和传播意识形态），成为王公贵族或教会的“侍女”。音乐家逐渐专业化（Professionalized Musicians: 音乐创作和表演成为一种专门职业），为有闲阶级提供娱乐，这正是音乐会（Concerts: 供人们欣赏音乐表演的公开集会）的起源。
我们必须摒弃现代音乐会的观念去理解史前音乐。过去数百万年里，绝大多数音乐都是功能性表演（Functional Performance: 音乐与特定的日常活动或劳动结合，而非纯粹的艺术欣赏），例如19世纪的采棉歌（Cotton Hollers）或水手号子（Sea Shanties），它们的节奏与劳作活动紧密相连。在广阔的棉田里，呼喊歌（Cotton Holler）需要通过“哀嚎的旋律”进行远距离沟通，这被认为是蓝调和爵士乐中悲伤、哀叹的早期来源。此外，早期音乐是参与式（Participatory: 音乐创作和表演不区分创作者和听众，所有人都可以参与其中），创作者与听众并无区分。作曲家与听众的分离（Separation of Composer and Listener: 音乐由少数专业作曲家创作，由听众被动接受的现代模式）是现代文明的产物。
Original English Source
Now what changes when you invent farming and agriculture? You settle down and your whole mindset becomes fixed on the circle of the seasons, the circle of life. And music has roots. It digs down. And there's music composed for every frame of the circle of life, the the cycle of the seasons. Um and you invent the work the repeated repeatable work and the structure of the work becomes as cyclical as life itself. You invent the circle in music invent musical rituals and once music migrates from the farm to the town certain changes happen. Instruments can become heavy because you start to set quite permanent roots into the town. um you create heavy instruments like bells and gongs but also very delicate ones like harps and lootes which will be damaged over a journey and music's function now also changes with the growth of social hierarchy. The job of music is to be a handmaidaden to serve the power, the power of the prince or the church. And musicians become professionalized and their job is to um create music to be listened to for people with leisure. And this is the origin of what we call concerts. We have to get away from the modern notion that music was performed in what we call concerts. To to have a concert requires leisure. um requires money and often times it's the aristocrats or the um the the the upper middle class who had the the time to sit back and enjoy music performed for them. For most people over millions of years that didn't happen. So the rule is that most music was performed functionally um in the fields. For instance, the cotton hollers we have in the 19th century were performed um on the water and we think of examples of sea shanties. The quality of the song reflects the activity. So um on a boat you're closely confined and when you're hauling the anchor the rhythm of hauling um blow the man down a sea shanty necessarily imitates the rhythm of work. away. >> If you compare that with a cotton holler, you're no longer on a ship. You're in a wide open space. You have to raise your voice to connect to somebody quite far away. >> And you get a sort of wailing contour. And indeed um many people uh argue that blues in jazz originates from the sadness the grief of wailing which happens naturally in a cotton hole where you'll be wailing literally bewailing your state of life and similar um comparisons could be made um with fulling cloth where the rhythm of creating or or weaving you hear that in these uh rotations of the wheel and spinning songs uh are memories of the origin of spinning songs uh when you were actually creating the cloth. Most music was performed as we say whistle as as you work. Also, it was performed in a participatory way. So, there was no um distinction between those who create the music and those who listen to it. It was the same people. The idea that we have a composer and we have a listener is a purely modern invention.乐谱的诞生与西方音乐的全球化霸权
随着文明发明书写，乐谱也应运而生。巴比伦人和苏美尔人创造了最早的乐谱，现存最早可辨识的完整乐曲是公元200年的塞基洛斯之歌（Seikilos Epitaph: 古希腊的一首铭文歌曲）。然而，西方音乐在公元1020年，由意大利僧侣圭多（Guido of Arezzo: 中世纪音乐理论家，发明了现代五线谱的雏形）发明五线谱（Staff Notation: 记录音乐音高和时值的五条平行线），这彻底改变了西方音乐的命运。
五线谱成为教会控制的工具，它通过记录圣歌确保了基督王国边缘地区的僧侣也能唱诵同一曲调，实现了文化统一（Cultural Unification: 通过统一的艺术形式在广阔区域内建立文化认同和控制）。当西班牙征服者科尔特斯（Cortez）于1519年入侵墨西哥时，他带去了用五线谱写成的西班牙复调音乐手稿，并教授阿兹特克人演唱。令人震惊的是，仅仅十年后，阿兹特克音乐家便能在墨西哥大教堂演唱西班牙复调音乐。因此，乐谱成为全球化的利器（Sharp End of Globalization: 某种工具或策略在推动全球化过程中发挥关键且具支配性的作用），推动了西方音乐在全球的传播和统治。
然而，五线谱也带来了诸多负面影响。它将音符“钉”在纸上，使其变得精确、冷漠和机械化，犹如捕捉蝴蝶般将声音抽离于人声的自然流动。乐谱将音乐凝固成客体（Object: 被视为独立存在的、可被分析和再现的事物），而非一种活动（Activity: 强调音乐的动态性、参与性和即兴性）。这导致了作曲家与表演者的分化，传统音乐被冻结在“假想的音乐作品博物馆”中。与印度卡纳提克或斯坦杜音乐的有机口头传统（Organic Oral Tradition: 通过师徒相传、灵活即兴而不断演变的音乐传承方式）形成鲜明对比，后者鼓励弟子在作品概念上进行创造性即兴，而非机械复制。
Original English Source
As soon as civilization invents writing, it invents musical notation. The Babylonians and the Samrians invent the first musical notation. And the first example of that is the Hurian hymn number six,400 BC which nobody can unfortunately decipher. The first decipherable uh complete piece of music is the seculos song dated 200 AD and found in modern day Turkey or Anatolia. But the west in many ways splits apart from the continental mainstream when it invents staff notation which is writing music in five lines. A thousand years ago in a thousand 20 an Italian monk called Gido invents staff notation and life was never again the same for western music. Why is that so important? Staff notation was a tool of church control. And through writing chants down, the church could ensure literally that um monks singing at the furthest outpost of the empire of Christendom, say Hadrien's wall in the northern extreme of England, literally sang from the same hem sheet. You can control what people were doing across the entirety of the empire. And then once the empire expands beyond the Mediterranean basin and Cortez invades Mexico in 1519, he takes notation with him. He takes manuscripts of Spanish polifany written down in staff notation and he teaches the Aztecs how to sing Spanish counterpoint. And what is astonishing is that 10 years after Cortez um decimates the Indians in 1519, by 1530 you have Aztec musicians singing Spanish polifany in Mexico Cathedral. So music notation becomes the um the sharp end of the stick of globalization and the domination of the planet. Now there are various consequences to staff notation. Many of them um are frankly bad. By pinning notes down to a page, almost like capturing a butterfly, you're taking a note away from the voice. You're making it very precise. If you look at the way most people speak or sing, the pitch slides, it fluctuates. This doesn't stay still. Notation freezes a note. It becomes rather cold and mechanical. It also freezes music as an object, which is actually quite counterintuitive. Music isn't an object. It's an activity. It's a thing you do like dancing or jogging. But once you turn it into an object, um, you create a division between the composer of the object and those who merely mechanically reproduce it, a performer. and tradition becomes frozen into a museum an imaginary museum of musical works and if you compare that to what's done um say in the karnatic tradition or the Hindustani tradition of India music there is an organic and evolving oral tradition which is handed down from guru to disciple where a disciple doesn't mechanically reproduce a work uh they creatively improvise around the idea of the work.音乐的普适性：自然的分形结构与人类的整合创造
音乐的分形本质（Fractal Nature: 在不同尺度上展现出自相似性的特性）是其普适性的一大惊喜，正如宇宙和海岸线一样。音乐是重复的艺术（Art of Repetition: 音乐通过重复主题、乐句和结构来构建整体），从音符到乐章都展现出自相似性。这种能力源于声音或噪音本身的特性：声波图在任何聚焦程度下都表现出自我相似性，这使得音乐与自然噪音（如风声、水波）具有相同的结构，使其完全自然（Perfectly Natural: 音乐与自然界的声音现象和规律高度契合）。这比古老的“天体和声”神话更能深刻地揭示音乐与宇宙的关系。
然而，尽管音乐具有普遍性，人类在音乐能力上并非天生卓越。相比于具有发声学习能力（Vocal Learning: 能够创造性地学习新歌曲或声音模式）的鸟类和具有节奏感的昆虫，猿类并不擅长音乐。因此，人类的音乐是在猿类不具备音乐性的基础上，从零开始（From Scratch: 从最基本的元素开始，逐步构建复杂系统）重新进化而来的。人类是伟大的整合者（Great Synthesizers: 能够将不同来源或元素融合创造出全新事物的能力），我们融合了昆虫的节奏、鸟类的旋律和猿类的姿态，并融入了宇宙的分形结构。更重要的是，我们注入了人类独有的情感驱动（Emotional Drives: 内在的情绪力量，如喜悦、悲伤、愤怒、恐惧，驱动着人类行为和艺术创作）和生命有限性（Finitude of Human Life: 人类生命有始有终的本质），这使得人类音乐超越了单纯的声音组合。
旅行者号黄金唱片（Voyager Golden Record: 1977年NASA发射的旅行者号探测器上携带的镀金唱片，旨在向外星文明介绍地球文化）的设想引人深思：如果外星文明发现它，能否从中识别出人类音乐的共同点？他们可能会发现人类音乐与动物音乐的层次性（Hierarchical: 音乐结构分层组织，从基本元素到复杂整体都包含重复模式）相似，都在不同层级上重复。但他们也会发现人类音乐独特的“行走节拍”，这源于我们400万年前的双足行走，与鲸鱼流动的节奏和鸟类跳跃的节奏截然不同，反映了不同物种在环境中运动的方式。因此，“音乐是通用语言吗？”的答案是复杂的。人类天生具备识别节奏和旋律的音乐本能（Music Instinct: 人类与生俱来对音乐的感知、理解和反应能力），但这种本能会随着文化对儿童的影响而具体化，例如不同节拍的摇篮曲会塑造孩子未来的节奏偏好。
Original English Source
Chapter 2, the universality of music. One of the surprises is that music is fractal in its nature. It's as fractal as a universe, which is to say that um a galaxy has the same shape as a brain cell. Um the universe exhibits self similarity at rising orders of magnitude just as music does. Music is the art of repetition. You have notes and a bar. You have bars repeated in a phrase. You have phrases in a section section in a work and so on add infin item. And this is extraordinary because this music draws this capacity from the nature of sound or noise itself. If you take a spectrograph um of noise which is a way of um representing noise through waveforms the waveforms exhibit self similarity however um much you focus it. So if you blow up a detail of the waveform it looks the same in the same way as a um a coastline or a cloud is fractal. So the noise of nature, the sound of the wind softing through the grass or the ripples of water, we enjoy this sound. Um it's pleasant, it's fractal. And music has the same uh um structure as as nature, as natural noise in this respect. And this makes music really perfectly natural. And it's a much more interesting way of regarding the relationship between music and the cosmos and the rather old-fashioned myth of the um harmony of the spheres or universal harmony. Um so the ancients, the Greeks and the Chinese and the and the Sumerians believe that u music mirrors the cosmos because it represents the same harmonic proportions which you see in the intervals. So fifths and octaves and fourths the acoustic um ratios are natural in that respect. So Capernicus thought that the planets um orbited in musical proportions. That's the oldfashioned view of um music's universality. I think um the fractal theory is much more interesting and it plugs in much more dramatically into the latest findings in in astronomy and and in the analysis of musical structure. Now, once you widen the lens as widely as possible and you see the big picture of where sapion music comes from, the the cosmic joke, the irony is that humans aren't very musical at all compared to how naturally musical birds and whales are. And we know this because we evolved along the ape line. And apes compared to birds are not musical. How can I say that? Birds have vocal learning. They can creatively learn new songs. Apes can't do that. They are confined to the cause they're born with. Insects can uh uh pulse together in in rhythm. They have a sense of rhythm. Some birds have a sense of rhythm and apes don't have that. So it's it's very odd that humans evolved from apes who not were not musical but humans evolved music again from the ground up from scratch. So humans are the great synthesizers. I think it's a reason why although human music is innate and universal, it's also learned. And there's also a reason why humans have always been haunted by nostalgia for bird songs. We hear birds in the trees and this gives us a sense of inadequacy because bird song is natural and human music is not. Um what humans brought to the table is that we're the great synthesizers. We put put together the rhythms of insects, the melody of birds, the gesturality of of apes. We also reflect the fractal structure of the cosmos. But what we brought to it was the very human um drives of emotions and indeed the finite quality of human life that the fact that we die I think um haunts us and the idea of a limit is one of the horizons or boundary conditions of human music. So whilst the elements of music might still be there in the future once humans are gone. So uh fractal structure and the hierarchical quality of music of musical structure without human emotions or the finitude of the human lifespan it wouldn't it wouldn't be what I call music. So when NASA sent the golden record aboard Voyager 40 years ago, this suggested an a very interesting thought experiment because NASA stock the record with diverse examples of human music. For instance, a Bach Vandenberg Conurto, Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Good. Pan pipes from the Solomon Islands. Court music gamlan from Java. If we imagine aliens open this in a billion years, will they be able to um extrapolate some common denominator, something uh fundamentally human in this assortment of of earth music? And this begs the question, what do they have in common? Now, I think what they do have in common, even for an alien, is that um sapiens are flatlanders. We inhabit a very narrow band of perceptual space. We can't hear as low as whales. We can't hear as high as bats. Our songs aren't as long as whale songs, which can be 23 hours long. They aren't as fast as a pipist bat song, which can be as short as um a single wingbeat. What they will see though is a lot of commonality um between sapiens music and animal music. Both are hierarchical as to say that we repeat at rising levels as do birds and whales and that might strike aliens as interesting and they might say well actually this isn't so different from animal music. Um but they will recognize sapiens for perhaps having um this uh walking meter which goes back to asopithesines 4 million years ago that we have a rhythm of walking whereas whales have a rhythm of a much more fluid rhythm of floating through their own medium just as bird song is as jerky as the motions of a of a of a bird. So each species bird, whale and sapun is um reflects the kind of motion that their bodies pursue in their environments. I think that'll be apparent to aliens. So the question of is music a universal language is an interesting one because on the surface every culture in the world though it um values music has different kinds of scales and harmonies but um you can say that there is a music instinct that we're all born for a capacity for music expressed through an ability which is innate to uh recognize rhythm to beat in time to rhythm to recognize melody to recall a melody. So this universality then changes that the second that culture gets its hooks into a child, it actually matters um whether you bounce your baby in rhythms of two or three beats. It'll determine the kind of rhythm the baby will grow out to enjoy. It matters to the baby the kind of melodies you sing to the child. um babies born in the west prefer certain kind of tuning system to those born in say Indonesia.音乐与大脑：从生理基底到文化情感的深度融合
人类对音乐的倾向和情感反应的普遍性根植于大脑的分层结构（Layered Structure: 大脑不同区域负责处理不同层次的功能，从基础反射到高级认知）。脑干（Brain Stem: 大脑最古老的部分，负责基本生命功能和反射）响应声音冲击，基底神经节（Basal Ganglia: 位于大脑深处，与运动控制、学习和情感处理相关）对声音的愉悦或不悦做出反应，杏仁核（Amygdala: 情绪处理中心）负责处理喜悦、悲伤、愤怒、恐惧等情绪。而大脑最进化、最先进的新皮层（Neocortex: 大脑最外层，负责高级认知功能，如学习模式和复杂体验）则处理音乐的复杂性和模式。越深入大脑深层，音乐和情感的普遍性就越强。
人类音乐的独特性在于声音与运动的紧密联系，这得益于大脑运动区域与听觉皮层之间的连接。我们天生具备模仿本能（Mimicry Instinct: 模仿他人行为、情感或声音的倾向），这与镜像神经元（Mirror Neurons: 一种神经细胞，在个体执行特定行为和观察他人执行相同行为时都会激活）的存在有关。镜像神经元让我们能够“感受”他人的动作和情绪，例如打哈欠的传染性，以及对悲伤歌曲的共鸣，这体现了情感传染（Emotional Contagion: 情绪在人与人之间传递和共享的现象）。
音乐能够引发“寒颤”（The Chills）或崇高体验（The Sublime: 面对巨大、超凡或危险事物时产生的敬畏和震撼感），这与大脑处理恐惧的区域相同。音乐通过在安全环境中模拟危险体验（如音量突破、模式中断），触发我们对生存威胁的本能反应，但又消除了实际的危险。达尔文指出，情感具有适应性作用（Adaptive Role: 情感在进化过程中帮助生物体应对环境挑战，促进生存和繁殖），例如快乐、愤怒、悲伤和恐惧都与目标的实现或受阻、损失或威胁相关。音乐正是通过模式的建立与打破来激活这些深层情感反应，构成一种精神时间旅行（Mental Time Travel: 心理上回顾过去或展望未来的能力），让我们在生理层面上回归“大自然母亲”。
Original English Source
Chapter 3, your brain on music. What makes human music so distinctive is our link between sound and motion which is due to the connections in the human brain between the motor regions controlling our motion and the regions controlling hearing and and sound the audiary um cortex. Uh birds as a rule don't have that link with the possible exception of selfacested cockatos. So as long as long as you want to go back there is this link between uh rhythm and motion um if you uh rock a baby to a particular rhythm that baby will come to like that particular rhythm. We also love to imitate rhythm and that's due to the existence of mirror neurons in our brains. Uh so when the brain sees uh an action a physical action in in somebody else um you don't have to move to uh experience that motion in your brain because the mirror neurons are responding sympathetically. You've always had um an instinctive uh faculty to imitate um we call it mimmesis and uh we see that in all walks of life. Yorns are contagious. If I see you yawning, I yawn back. But also, emotions are contagious. If you're sad, I instinctively uh cleave to your sadness. I I mirror it. I I emote with you. And that's the same with music. When I feel sad, uh uh when I hear a a sad song, um my body, my mirror neurons are are instinctively sympathizing, are mimicking, I'm mirroring the um the human sadness encoded in that sad song. another you know vivid example of emotional contagion um which is related to um our mirror neurons uh vibrating sympathetically to the perception of somebody else moving. I once attended a concert and with my uh infant toddler and there were a thousand toddlers all jumping up and down instinctively to the sound of the orchestra playing the lone ranger. Now they had never heard the lone bench before. It's a William Tur by Rini, but they had an instinctive response to that that rhythm. And we're we're we're born for that. And even when you uh do an experiment um on babies who aren't sitting on their parents' knees. So you could perhaps argue that is the parents who are prompting their children to jump up and down. They do the same thing. So it's it's within the baby, not within the adult. There's an extreme reaction to music which has been called the chills or fo or the sublime. There are moments in music which are so intense and they're often triggered by um breakthrough moments of loudness or extremity. Um they're different for every person. It's interesting because you have the same parts of the brain which respond to that as response to fear which is why the chills give you goosebumps or pyro erection. The hairs on your skin literally stand on end like like when you're getting goosebumps. But you enjoy this fear and this is very strange. One of the definitions of uh musical uh aesthetics is that you learn to take the danger out of extreme experience. And we have a similar experience when we go on a fairground ride or when we're watching a volcanic eruption in the safety of an observation platform. It's almost as if music is is violence without the danger or the natural infinite the natural sublime without the danger. Darwin was the first to observe that emotion had an adaptive role in the field that animals and and people they experience emotions in relation to to goals which help them survive. So happiness is um when you achieve a goal. Anger is when the goal is blocked. Sadness is when uh uh you lose a loved one. Fear is the most uh archetypal emotion. Uh when you're exposed to a threat from a snake, you have instinctive uh response to either uh freeze or to fight or to flee. And music is full of similar responses. Music is made of patterns and uh patterns can either be allowed to run their course or they can be frustrated through shocks. And when we hear a shock in music, it can be a bang or the interruption of a pattern. Um that engages the same uh faculties in our brain as danger out in the field. Of course, nobody dies in music. This is only a a derived uh effect of that. But this is is why we think that music is able to express emotion in a very visceral way. Uh and emotions are also processed at at different levels of the brain. Starting with the brain stem which flinches to shocks and then the uh reptile brain the uh basal ganglia responds to pleasure or displeasure. The mamalian amygdala responds to emotions, happiness, sadness, and the neoortex processes emotions through pattern. So when you're listening to music, it's a kind of mental time travel. You really are when you're um absorbed in a work, you're traveling back through layer upon layer of your brain almost biologically, which is why I call music a sort of umbilical cord back to mother nature. It's mental time travel.音乐训练重塑大脑，提升心智与社交健康
音乐训练能够重塑大脑（Rewires the Brain: 通过学习和实践改变大脑的神经连接和功能结构）。大多数人惯用右脑，但音乐家的大脑会变得更偏向左脑，他们通过处理语言的颞叶来听音乐，这表明复杂音乐与语言的复杂性相当。学习乐器能带来众多可迁移技能（Transferable Skills: 在不同情境和领域中都能应用的技能），如纪律性、时间管理、团队合作（如管弦乐队）和专注力。将音乐纯粹视为放松或娱乐是对其巨大价值的贬低。
音乐对心理健康（Mental Health: 心理和情绪上的健康状态）具有显著益处：
- 凝聚人群（Bring People Together: 音乐作为一种共享体验，促进人际联系和社会团结），缓解孤独感。
- 降低压力（Lowers Stress: 音乐通过减少皮质醇水平来减轻生理和心理压力），提供愉悦感，通过释放多巴胺使人快乐。
- 标记记忆（Tagging Memories: 音乐与特定记忆和经历绑定，有助于回忆过去）。
- 表达情感与身份（Expressing Emotions and Identity: 音乐能够表达语言难以捕捉的深层情感和个人身份认同），特别是青少年时期对音乐品味的形成，往往定义了个人的身份。
- 促进正念（Promotes Mindfulness: 音乐作为一种专注的聆听和沉思活动，提升当下意识）。
然而，音乐也可能对大脑产生负面影响，例如被军事化（Militarized: 音乐被用作强制手段或心理战工具）。任何令人不悦的声音都可能造成伤害，因此在临床上开具音乐“处方”时必须极其谨慎。例如，巴洛克音乐的重复性对阿尔茨海默病患者可能适得其反；抑郁症患者不应接触加重其病情的音乐。医生需要接受专业教育，了解如何针对不同病症开出合适的音乐处方。
Original English Source
The astonishing fact is musical training rewires the brain. Now most of us are rightrained. Uh if we train a musician they become left brain. They hear uh music through the same uh temporal lobe which processes language which makes sense because complex music is as complex as language. And there are so many skills which fall out of the discipline of learning to play an instrument. You learn discipline. You learn how to practice, how to organize your time. You learn how to work together in a team. To play in an orchestra is team building. You learn how to pay attention. You learn how to focus on sounds. These are all highly transferable skills. Appreciating music purely as a form of relaxation or entertainment does a massive disservice to all the things that music helps you with. Um, let's list them. Music can bring people together. The biggest draw to mental health is loneliness. You don't have to actively make music with somebody else. Just to listen to music plugs you into a social network because every note of music is social, is formed of social conventions. Music um lowers stress by reducing cortisol. It gives you pleasure, makes you happy by flooding the brain with neurotransmitters like dopamine. Music is an excellent way of tagging memories, remembering the past. Um music is a fantastic way of expressing your deepest emotions and your identity which can't be captured by language. Why is that? because music is far too precise for words to capture what's going on. And there's a reason why teenagers um you know imprint their taste in music with um with songs they learn at that time because music has always come to define identity of who you are. Um all these things um you know increase your mental health and ultimately um music becomes a mode of mindfulness of contemplation. It's not purely relaxing because there's too much going on when you're listening and the word relaxation uh gives a sense of passivity whereas to listen is a very active and creative activity. Music of course can also harm the brain. It can be militarized as we know from examples of Bontano Mobay when um the army plays certain kinds of music to inmates. Um as a rule any um sound you dislike can harm you. So I may be into metal but you might not be. So if I play metal very loudly that will increase your stress levels. And similarly uh much as we know about the health benefits of music you have to be extremely cautious in how you prescribe it clinically. So for instance um Alzheimer's patients don't do well listening to Barack music. Um it's too repetitive for them and certain conditions respond better to uh softer music or to uh uh music with greater variety. Um if you're suffering from depression then you don't want to hear a a kind of music which reinforces that condition. So, um, it's it's fine to argue for music to be a prescribed drug, but you have to educate the doctors in the kinds of music to prescribe.音乐的未来：个性化、技术融合与感官拓展
面对互联网时代音乐的普及与可及性，有人担忧所有音乐最终会趋于同质化（Homogenized: 指事物失去独特性和多样性，变得千篇一律）。但斯皮策教授认为这不会发生，原因有二：首先，艺术家追求独特的竞争驱动力促使他们不断创新，背离时尚；其次，音乐流派的日益增多（数千种流派和子流派）以及音乐作为表达人类身份（Human Identity: 个人或群体基于文化、信仰、情感等形成的独特自我认知）的强大工具，将确保其多样性。只要人类保有独特身份，就会创作反映个性的音乐。
关于音乐的未来，斯皮策教授提出两点预测：
- 功能化与工具化（Instrumentalized and Functional: 音乐被有目的地设计和使用，以达成特定的功能或治疗效果）。未来音乐可能被精准地“注射”以治疗抑郁症等情绪障碍，成为高度定制化的个性化处方（Bespoke Prescription: 根据个体需求量身定制的解决方案）。
- 与技术的深度融合（Deep Integration with Technology: 音乐创作、传播和体验与前沿科技紧密结合）。互联网已经让音乐从少数音乐家手中回归大众，数字平台使人们在家中即可创作和分享音乐，重新获得了数千年前参与式音乐（Participatory Music: 强调所有个体都能平等参与音乐创作和享受的过程）的状态。此外，人与技术之间的物理连接（Physical Connectivity: 人体与外部技术设备或系统之间建立的互动连接）将更加紧密，例如手机已使我们成为共生体（Symbiote: 两种或多种生物或系统之间互利共存的组合），这种共生关系在K-pop等数字文化互动中表现尤为明显。他强调，技术并非邪恶，所有的乐器（包括早期的骨笛和现代的计算机程序Watson Beat）都是扩展人类能力的工具，它拓展了我们的声音、手指和想象力。
斯皮策教授大胆预测，未来的音乐可能不仅仅是声音的艺术，它可能涉及味觉、色彩、身体感受和目前听觉频谱无法捕捉的频率，从而极大地拓展人类的听觉范围和感官体验。正如几个世纪前的人无法想象今天的音乐成就，我们也难以预测音乐在未来将呈现出怎样惊人的可能性。