1 . Do you like Chinese traditional painting and dance ? They are two important parts of the traditional Chinese art. But what about when they meet each other?

This year, a dance drama titled Poetic Dance: The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting (《只此青绿》) was staged on CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala and became popular.

According to CCTV, this poetic dance program was inspired by the 900-year-old Chinese painting A Panorama of Rivers and Mountains (《千里江山图》). Created by Song Dynasty painter Wang Ximeng at about 18, the painting is amazing in its sweeping size, rich coloration and the expressive details, reported CCTV. It shows a Chinese blue-green landscape: “mountains and groupings of infinite (无限的) rise and fall between cloudless sky and rippling (涟漪的) water”.

When the dancers moved elegantly, audiences seemed to be looking at the moving mountains and rivers. “It brings me a pure experience of beauty. It is not only a drama but also an exhibition. Vast mountains and rivers are coming to life!” Internet user Mo Weisha wrote in a review. “More than a thousand years later, green mountains and rivers still impress people as they did long ago.” Some people even decided to watch the dance again when it was staged in the theaters later. In fact, in recent years, more and more modern shows feature Chinese traditional culture and have received warm welcome. As for the reason, it is due to people’s great love for traditional culture.

“The younger generations have grown up with a more open mind. They accept Chinese culture and are proud of it.” Yao Wei, director of Henan TV Station’s Innovation Center, told China Daily.

3 . Amazing Benefits of Listening to Music

If you love listening to music, you’re in good mood. Recent research shows that listening to music improves our mental and physical health.     1    .

Music lowers stress (压力).

Music brings happiness.

More than 350 million people are not happy around the world. Music can make people happy, depending on the type of music.     3    . But heavy metal brings people down even more. When you feel low, put on some popular folk music or relaxing music to make you happy.

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Music can lead people to eat fewer calories and enjoy their meals better. If you’re looking for ways to reduce your weight, try listening to soft music next time you sit down for a meal.

Music raises school performance.

Taking music lessons predicts higher school performance in young children. In one study, children who took singing lessons had learned better than children who took other lessons unrelated to music.     5    , you can let them take music lessons. Or you can encourage them to sing or learn to play an instrument.

4 . For some people, music is no fun at all. About 4% of the population is what scientists call “amusic”. People who are amusic are born without the ability to enjoy musical notes. Amusic people often cannot tell the differences between two songs.

As a result, songs sound like noise to an amusic. Many amusics compare the sound of music to pieces of metal hitting each other. Life can be hard for amusics. In fact, most people cannot understand what it feels like to be amusic. Just going to a restaurant or a shopping center can be uncomfortable or even painful. That is why many amusics have to stay away from places where there is music. However, this can result in social loneliness. “I used to hate parties,” says Margaret, a seventy-year-old woman who only recently discovered that she was amusic. By studying people like Margaret, scientists are finally learning how to identify this unusual condition.

Scientists say that the brains of amusics are different from those of people who can enjoy music. The difference is complex, as it is not connected with poor hearing and has nothing to do with intelligence. Amusics can understand other non-musical sounds well. They also have no problems understanding common speech. Scientists compare amusics to people who just can’t see certain colors.

Many amusics are happy when their condition is finally diagnosed (诊断). For years, Margaret felt embarrassed about her music problem. Now she knows that she is not alone. That makes it easier for her to explain. “When people invite me to a concert, I just say ‘No, thanks. I’m amusic,’” says Margaret.

5 . It’s hard to say why, but it’s just true: Music is good for you. It can calm your spirit and help you vent (发泄) your anger.     1    . But there’s one surprising yet well-documented effect that has really surprised people. Music lessons are very good for language comprehension — and they might even be better than reading lessons.

    2    . But in this new study from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), researchers were able to see music lessons improve word comprehension right before their eyes. Led by Robert Desimone, the director of McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the team tested 74 children between the ages of four and five to see how their growing language skills were affected by piano lessons.

The 74 participants were divided into three groups.     3    . The other two had their weekly academic lessons supplemented with three 45-minute lessons per week — the first got piano lessons and the second took part in reading lessons.

What are the results? The ones who received a little extra learning every week outperformed those who just continued on with their normal studies.     4    . Perhaps even more surprisingly, the children who took the music lessons even outperformed the ones who took the reading lessons when it came to telling the difference between two words that were very similar.

“That’s a big thing for kids in learning language: being able to hear the differences between words,” Desimone said in a statement. “They really benefited from that.” To the researchers, the results point to one clear conclusion:     5    

8 . How similar are language and music?

Language is part of our daily lives, no matter where we live in the world.     1     Both language and music play a huge role in our culture and here are some of their similarities.

Both language and music have a writing system.

In English we record language using the alphabet, which is a collection of letters. Similarly, we use notes (音符) to keep a record of music. Musicians read notes and create meaning in the form of music.     2     By writing pieces of text or music, we are able to share experiences through time. We can read the ideas or hear the composition (作品) of someone who lived hundreds of years ago.

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You can make a good guess at where someone is from by listening to the language he uses. In the same way, we know that styles of music are different around the world, giving us the opportunity to explore many different cultures through their music and providing us with music for every situation.

Both share emotion.

    4     Of course you may be able to see it in my face, but you will know for sure through my words. Similarly, music can sound angry, sad or happy. Music can show you exactly how the composer was or is feeling, and allows us to share that emotion. When you feel happy, you might want to sing and dance to a happy song to celebrate your happiness.    5     I think we have all used music to express or process our emotions, often combining it with language in the form of song lyrics (歌词).

10 . In a world of music streaming services, access to almost any song is just a few clicks away. Yet, the live concert lives on. People still fill sweaty basements to hear their favorite musicians play. And now neuroscientists might know why.

Concerts are immersive social experiences in which people listen to and feel the music together. They are also dynamic — artists can adapt their playing according to the crowd’s reaction.

It was this last difference that led neuroscientists, from Universities of Zurich and Oslo, to study the brain responses of people listening to music. In the experiment, participants lay in an MRI (核磁共振) scanner listening to the music through earphones, while a pianist was positioned outside the room. The pianist was shown the participant’s real-time brain activity as a form of feedback. In the recorded condition, participants listened to pre-recorded versions of the same tunes.

The scientists were interested in how live music affected the areas of the brain that process emotions. In the live condition pianists were instructed to change their playing in order to drive the activity in one of these regions known as the amygdala.

The results, just published in the journal PNAS, showed that live music had far more emotional impact. Whether the music was happy or sad, listening to the pianist playing in a dynamic way generated more activity in both the amygdala and other parts of the brain’s emotion processing network.

The study was far from reconstructing the real experience of a concert, and the authors noted that the live music ended up sounding quite different from the recorded tracks, which may have driven some of the differences in participant’s brain activity. Some musical acts now attempt to recreate the real concert experience with everything but the artist — ABBA Voyage is a social, immersive show performed entirely by pre-recorded hologram avatars (全息图). But without Benny’s (a member of the band) ability to read the mood of the room, it will never quite match the real thing.