2 . What are two things that make humans different from animals? One is language and the other is music. It’s true that some animals can sing. However, the songs of animals like birds are very limited. It’s also true that humans, not animals, have developed musical instruments.

Music is a strange thing. It’s clearly different from language. However, people can use music to communicate things—especially their emotions. When music is used with speech in a song, it’s a very powerful form of communication.

If music is truly different from speech, then we should process music and language in different parts of the brain. The scientific study suggests this is true. For example, Vissarion Shebalin, a Russian composer, had a stroke (中风) in 1953. It injured the left side of his brain. He could no longer speak or understand speech. He could, however, still compose music until his death ten years later. On the other hand, sometimes strokes cause people to lose their musical ability, but they can still speak and understand speech.

Why does music have such a strong effect on us physically and emotionally? That’s a harder question to answer. Geoffrey Miller, a researcher at University College, London, thinks that music and love have a strong connection. Music requires special talent, practice and physical ability. That’s some-one’s mate. For example, playing a musical instrument requires fine muscular control. You also need a good memory to remember the notes. And playing those notes correctly suggests that your hearing is in excellent condition. Finally, when a man sings to the woman he loves, it may be a way of showing off.

However, Miller’s theory still doesn’t explain why certain combinations of sounds influence our emotions so deeply. For scientists, this is clearly an area that needs further research.

4 . Festivals in 2023

Roskilde Festival

With some of the biggest names in music, the Roskilde Festival in Denmark is preparing to bring fans an experience of a lifetime. Besides rock, electronic, and pop music, fans will also be treated to comedy, poetry, a carnival, and much more at this week-long festival. You can even rent a bike to get around the festival quickly.

Boomtown Fair

Boomtown is considered to be one of the wildest independent festivals in the world. Set up in 2009, in Winchester, United Kingdom, the fair takes place every summer in the city, offering entertainment for visitors of all ages. Additionally, it specially conducts arts and crafts workshops for kids. Tracing its origin (起源) to its “underground” roots, Boomtown offers every type of music, from folk and jazz to disco and punk.

Impact Festival

The festival stays true to its name and truly affect you through the experience you have while you attend the festival. You will spend your day meeting beautiful people, listening to some fantastic live music, seeing an combination (结合) of fashionable costumes and clothing, freeing your mind and spirit refreshed and dancing the night away with a bunch of other people. You will be staying in Lodz, the third largest city in Poland, a beautiful city.

Wilderness Festival

The combination of some kinds of attractive music, amazing food, and a lovely atmosphere come together to give you the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire, UK. Other than live music performances, the Oxfordshire Wilderness Festival also offers an environment for camping and enjoying the quiet backdrop of countryside.

Yours,

Li Hua

7 . From Mozart to Metallica, tons of people enjoy listening to various types of music while they paint, write, or draw. Most believe that music helps increase creativity, but an international study conducted by English and Swedish researchers is challenging that view. The study results were echoed by scientists from Lancaster University, and the University of Gavle, saying their findings show music actually weakens creativity.

To reach their conclusions, researchers had volunteers complete verbal problems designed to inspire creativity while sitting in a quiet room, and then again while music played in the background. They found that background music significantly weakened the volunteers’ ability to complete tasks connected with verbal creativity. The team also tested background noises like those commonly heard in a library, but found that such noises had no influence on subjects’ creativity.

The tasks were simple word games. For example, volunteers were given three words, such as dress, rise, and flower. Then, they were asked to find a single word connected with all three that could be combined to form a common phrase or word. The single word, in this case, would be “sun” (sundress, sunrise, sunflower). Volunteers completed the tasks in either a quiet room, or while listening to two different types of music: rock music or light music

“We found strong evidence of weakened performance when playing background music in comparison to quiet background conditions,” says co-author D. Neil McLatchie of Lancaster University. He and his colleagues find that music negatively influences the verbal working memory processes of the brain, preventing creativity. Also, as far as the library background noises having seemingly no effect, the study’s authors believe that was the case because library noises create a “regular state” environment that doesn’t affect concentration.

“To conclude, the findings here challenge the popular view that music increases creativity, and instead show that music, whatever type it is, is always a disadvantage for creative performance in problem solving,” the study reads.