1 . Max Mathews has been called the father of computer music.He created electronic tools so that people could use computers as musical instruments.He had a great influence on the development of electronic music and how it is written, recorded and played.
In 1957，Mathews wrote the first computer program that enabled a computer to create sound.At that time, he was working as an engineer at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.His computer program enabled a large IBM computer to play a 17 seconds piece of music that he had written.The computer was so slow that it would have taken an hour to play the piece of music in 17 seconds.For that reason, Mathews moved the work to a tape player, which could be sped up to play the music at a normal speed.He later said that the sound quality of the musical notes was not great，but the technical importance of the music was huge.
Mathews continued creating other versions of the music program.He became interested in how computers could help musicians outside recording studios.The Groove program he developed was the first computer program made for live performances.
He also developed an electronic device he called the Radio Baton.The device looks like two drum sticks.It enables the user to control the speed and sound levels of orchestral music playing on a computer.The user does this by moving the two sticks on a special electronic surface.
Mathews believed modern musicians are not making full use of the power of computer music.He said a violin always sounds like a violin.But with a computer, the way a violin sounds is unlimited.He said he didn’t want computer sounds to replace live music.But he said he hoped laptop computers would one day be considered serious instruments.
1. What do we know about Mathews’s first piece of computer music?| A．It took several minutes to play this music. |
| B．It was written in the middle of the 1950s. |
| C．It made the IBM computer work so slowly. |
| D．It had the same good quality as other music. |
| A．improve the sound quality of music |
| B．create a record for recording studios |
| C．improve the live performances |
| D．develop the computer music |
| A．a computer program |
| B．a piece of computer music |
| C．an electronic device |
| D．a recording studio |
| A．computer sounds would take the place of live music |
| B．modern musicians would make good use of computer music |
| C．computers would change the musical instruments |
| D．computers would be considered serious instruments |
2 . Alarmed by a tragic(悲剧的) shooting in his hometown, a New Orleans musician gives hope to kids-for a song.
Allen was sleeping at home one evening last July when he was frightened awake by a TV news item. There had been a shooting among a group of children in the 7th Ward of New Orleans, only a few miles from Alen's home, and a nine-yearold boy named Bryant had been killed. Allen was horrified and heartbroken. He thought of his own nine-year-old son.
After seeing the tragic news that morning, it didn't take long for Allen to hit on a possible solution.He is one of the most famous jazz trumpeters(小号手) in the city, and he had a few spare trumpets lying around. Maybe he could offer them to kids in exchange for their guns.
“What saved me and redirected my path was a trumpet and the music of the city that it connected me with" Allen says. "t showed me that success can be managed through self-expression.”
Allen named the program My Trumpet Is My Weapon.“Just to see that they actually want to give up their guns, that's the cool part about it," says Allen, who has collected seven guns so far, a small but important start.
But he doesnt stop with the exchange of gun for instrument(乐器).After the exchanges, Allen connects the children with local musicians who give them free virtual (虚拟的) trumpet lessons. He also started a GoundMe page to buy more instruments to give away. So far, he has collected over $45,000. More importantly, he has brought hope to his city and young people looking for a better life.
“Music may not be the way for you, but it will at least open your mind to see what's out there," says Allen.
1. What news did Allen get one evening last July?| A．His nine-year-old son was killed. |
| B．A young boy named Bryant was shot dead. |
| C．A group of children died of gun shooting |
| D．His house was burnt to ashes. |
| A．Teaching kids to blow trumpets. | B．Encouraging kids to learn jazz music. |
| C．Ordering kids to give up their guns. | D．Exchanging trumpets for kids' guns. |
| A．Making it possible to buy more instruments. |
| B．Making the city and young people hopefiul. |
| C．Raising money for the city and young people. |
| D．Collecting money to pay for trumpet lessons. |
| A．Caring and intelligent. | B．Hard-working and lovely. |
| C．Honest and selfless. | D．Warm-hearted and strict. |
3 . An international group of electronic music composers is taking beats from the dance club to jungles and forests and back, all to help save nature's greatest singers. A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean is a new album that includes the sounds of endangered birds. The album will come out next month, whose proceeds will go directly towards efforts to save birds.
The whole project was born out of this idea of trying to combine birdsong, electronic music and conservation. A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean was organized by activist, music producer, Robin Perkins. He invited artists from each of the endangered birds 'homelands to build their own songs around the birds’ songs. There are contributions from ten artists in eight different countries.
First single Black Catbird was created by The Garifuna Collective, from Belize. Al Obando, guitarist and producer of the group, always took in national parks and viewed birds when on the road with the band. “There are no trails, and there are no signs there to tell you about what you reseeing,” Obando says. “So we're trying to do something for the birds and nature tourism.”
Another musician who responded to Robin's call is Tamara Montenegro, an artist from Nicaragua. She was shocked to hear of the serious situation of the Guardabarranco after being approached: “This beautiful creature I grew up adoring also faced the influence of the systematic human activities”. In response, she created a song inspired by this bird and the challenges it faces to live naturally.
The new album is the second edition, following on from A Guide to the Birdsong of South America, produced by Robin in 2015. That first album has raised, to date, over $15,000 benefitting conservation projects in South America. As with the first album, all of the money from the sales of the new album will support specific organizations, including Birds Caribbean.
1. What does the underlined word “proceeds” in Paragraph 1 refer to?| A．Profits. | B．Budgets. | C．Challenges. | D．Effects. |
| A．He created a hit single himself. |
| B．He was fond of observing birds. |
| C．He was the organizer of the new album. |
| D．He did a lot for birds in South America. |
| A．It was friendly to humans. |
| B．It was beautiful in appearance. |
| C．It was losing its living environment. |
| D．It was facing challenges from other birds. |
| A．To collect money for a project. |
| B．To popularize electronic music. |
| C．To recommend some famous artists. |
| D．To introduce a new album of electronic music. |
4 . Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony is learned and not based on natural ability, a new study by University of Melbourne researchers has found. The researchers said previous theories about how we appreciate music were based on the physical functions of sound, the ear itself and a born ability to hear harmony.
The study shows that musical harmony can be learned, and it is a matter of training the brain to hear the sounds. So if you thought that the music of some foreign culture (or Jazz) sounded like the crying of cats, it’s simply because you haven’t learned to listen by their rules.
The researchers used 66 volunteers with a range of musical training and tested their ability to hear combinations of notes (音符) to determine if they found the combinations familiar or pleasing. They found that people needed to be familiar with combinations of notes. If they found the notes unfamiliar they also found the sound unpleasant. This finding put an end to centuries of theories claiming that physical functions of the ear determine what we find attractive.
The study found that trained musicians were much more sensitive to unpleasant notes than non-musicians. When they couldn’t find the note, the musicians reported that the sounds were unpleasant, while non-musicians were much less sensitive. This shows the importance of training or nurturing (培养) the brain to like particular sound of combinations of notes, like those found in jazz or rock.
Depending on their training, a strange chord (和弦) sound was pleasant to some musicians, but very unpleasant to others. This showed us that even the ability to hear a musical note is learned.
To confirm this finding, they trained 19 non-musicians to find the notes of a random selection of western chords. Not only did the participants’ ability to hear notes improve rapidly, afterward they reported that the chords they had learned sounded more pleasant — regardless of how the chords were played.
The question of why some combinations of musical notes are heard as pleasant or unpleasant has long been debated.
We have shown in this study that for music, beauty is in the brain of the beholder (观看者)”, a researcher said.
1. According to the study, people find foreign music quite unpleasant because .| A．they hear the music much too often | B．they don’t like the person playing it |
| C．they have no idea about how to listen | D．they have no born musical ability at all |
| A．be trained to like particular music | B．make friends with real musicians |
| C．find the beauty of chords without training | D．enjoy the beauty of music when played by musicians |
| A．the brain likes particular combinations of notes |
| B．not a strange note was pleasant to all musicians |
| C．how the chords were played was very important |
| D．people’s ability to hear a musical note can be learned. |
| A．Love of musical harmony can’t be taught. | B．Love of music is not natural but nurtured. |
| C．Listening to music can improve your brain. | D．You can be a musician without being trained. |
| A．Stravinsky. | B．Holst. | C．Mozart. |
6 . Have you ever wondered why certain pop songs just make you feel so good?
Researchers studying the question found that the right combination of uncertainty and surprise is what gives listeners the most pleasure.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, involved an analysis of 80,000 chords( 和弦)in 745 pop songs from the US Billboard “Hot 100” chart between 1958 and 1991.
The researchers - from institutes in Germany, Norway, Denmark and the UK - used a machine-learning model to quantify the level of uncertainty and surprise of these chords, and then asked 39 adult volunteers to rate how pleasurable they found each series of chords.
Each song was stripped of its melody and lyrics(歌词)so that only chord progressions were left and the results couldn’t be influenced by other associations to the songs that listeners might have had.
They found two things: that participants got greater pleasure when they were relatively certain what would happen next but then were surprised by an unexpected chord progression. However, the same number of participants found it pleasant when they were uncertain as to what would follow, and then the subsequent chords were more familiar to them.
“It is fascinating that humans can get pleasure from a piece of music just by how sounds are ordered over time,” Vincent Cheung, the lead researcher on the paper from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany, said in a statement.
“Songs that we find pleasant are likely those which strike a good balance between knowing what is going to happen next and surprising us with something we did not expect. Understanding how music activates our pleasure system in the brain could explain why listening to music might help us feel better when we are feeling blue.”
Cheung told CNN that pleasure in music has a lot to do with what listeners expect. Previous studies had looked into the effects of surprise on pleasure, but he and his colleagues’ study also focused on the uncertainty of listeners’ predictions.
The findings may help improve artificial musical algorithms(算法)and could help composers write music or predict musical trends.
“The idea is that hopefully as a scientist analyzing these patterns of pleasure in humans, you can somehow work out where music can go next,” Peter Harrison, a researcher at Queen Mary University, London, who worked on the project, told CNN.
As part of the same experiment, the researchers also used brain imaging to locate the areas of the brain reflected in musical pleasure. They found the regions involved were the amygdala, the hippocampus and the auditory cortex, which process emotions, learning and memory, and sound, respectively.
Cheung added that another part of the brain, the nucleus accumbens - which processes reward expectations - was perhaps responsible for “directing our attention towards the music so that we will try to find out what will happen next.”
1. This passage mainly deals with _____.| A．how composers create pop music trends | B．why popular music makes people happy |
| C．what kind of music makes people most happy | D．which part of the brain produces happy music |
| A．reserved | B．restored | C．removed | D．refreshed |
| A．pleasure in music is connected with listeners’ expectations |
| B．findings of this study are of little help to music composing |
| C．the regions of the brain mentioned process music composing |
| D．only uncertainty followed by familiarity can bring about pleasure |
