Yangko, a rural Chinese folk dance with a history     1     (date) back thousands of years, originates from farming life in ancient times. The dance relates to sacrifices to the farmland god when people prayed for a good harvest. As time passed, the     2     (origin) dance developed, taking in various artistic forms and skills, including opera, acrobatics and martial arts, and eventually turned into the type of Yangko     3     is seen today.

    4     (preserve) this Chinese folk culture, it was included in the inaugural(首批的)items of national intangible cultural heritage in 2006. It is     5     (common) performed in northern China during festivals, especially for Chinese New Year and the Lantern Festival. Performances or competitions     6     (organize) in towns and villages to express people’s joy and their hope for a better life.

Yangko employs drumming, Suona, dancing and singing. Content is based     7     folk stories and legends. Costumes are richly-colored and opera-styled, enabling     8     (character) to be easily identified. During a performance, the actors will dance and sing, following lively rhythms. Highly. skilled and interesting acts such as stilt(高跷)walking     9     carrying a wedding sedan chair(花轿)are also included. As a part of traditional Chinese culture, Yangko     10     (concentrate) the group consciousness of the Chinese people, and has outstanding historical and cultural value.

9 . The ability of music to evoke (唤起) specific, often powerful feelings is no secret to anyone who has listened to Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 5”, Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child”, the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated”, Lizzo’s “Good as Hell” or any of the other countless compositions that have found their way onto Western playlists in the past few centuries.

The emotional effects of music are the point, of course. They are also the subject of a fast-growing field of research around the world in which scientists are exploring the nature of the many “subjective experiences”—such as joy, sadness, anxiety and calmness—that music evokes.

In a recent set of experiments, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and their colleagues sought to determine if the feelings that people experience when listening to music “show evidence of universality”. They compared and analyzed how more than 2,800 U.S. and Chinese study participants responded to 2,168 (mostly Western) samples of instrumental music. The team identified 13 distinct and very specific feelings that the Chinese and U.S. subjects shared when listening to music, despite their cultural differences.

The music used in the research, described in the paper as “the richest set of Western music samples ever studied,” included classical, pop, rock, indie, hip-hop, R&B, country, film soundtracks, and more. An additional 189 sample of traditional Chinese music was also used. In all, the researchers gathered 375,230 judgments of the samples from the study participants.

In the first experiment, subjects listened to Western music samples (each of which was just five seconds long) and reported on the specific feelings they evoked, choosing responses from a list of 28 “categories of subjective experience” provided by the researchers. Terms on the list included “victorious/heroic”, “sad/depressing”, “joyful/cheerful”, “awe-inspiring/amazing” and “dreamy”. The team then used data-driven statistical modeling to identify the 13 shared experiences. The second experiment, which included the Chinese music, involved broad evaluations of the samples by participants—such as whether the subjects liked or disliked them or found them exciting or not. A central finding of the study, the researchers write, is that specific feelings “drive the experience of music” more than the broader features.