为什么一听到某些音乐你就会不由自主地想跳起舞来？一项新研究表明，这和音乐里的低音有关，研究人员发现，在音乐会期间加入更多的低音会让人更多地随音乐起舞。相关结果发表在《当代生物学》（Current Biology）杂志上。
“从很小的时候起我就对音乐和音乐节奏十分着迷，特别是它们带给人们的感觉。”加拿大麦克马斯特大学（McMaster University）的博士后研究员丹尼尔·卡梅伦（Daniel Cameron）说，他同时也是个鼓手，“作为一名鼓手，你感兴趣的是如何让人群律动起来，心情愉悦，沉浸享受。这就涉及到了我的科学研究领域。”
卡梅伦和同事想弄明白，音乐是如何让我们的身体产生几乎无法抑制的冲动来随之律动的：“基于各种故事和实验证据，我们发现低音和起舞之间存在一定关联。”喜欢电子舞曲（EDM）的人表示，持续的低音会产生一种让他们想要随之律动的感觉，而一些研究表明，在锚定低音音符时，我们的动作节奏会更准确。“例如，如果你让人们跟着低音打节拍，他们的拍子会更准确一点，更一致一点。”
因此研究人员开始实验：“如果你在音乐中加入更多的低音，会引发更多的起舞吗？”他们不想以一种显而易见的方式对低音进行操纵，因为那样做人们可能会有意识地增加他们的舞动。“那可能会很有趣……”但也会混淆实验结果，这就好像药物试验中的受试者知道他们用的是真药而不是安慰剂一样。
卡梅伦表示：“我们想做一种微妙的操纵，一种非常难被察觉的操纵。”他们搞出了一套非常非常低频的喇叭。“这些是非常专业的扬声器，有点像低音炮。低音喇叭常常作为立体声系统的一部分，它们播放的频率低于大多数系统所能播放的频率，甚至比我们通常能够听到的频率还要低。”
研究人员设置了这些特殊的扬声器，举办了一场音乐会，邀请电子音乐二重奏Orphx去到他们的LIVELab，这里的“LIVE”是“large, interactive virtual environment”，即……[查看全文]
It's the Bass That Makes Us Boogie
Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.
Hopkin: Ever notice that some music just really makes you want to dance?Well, a new study shows that it is, indeed, all about the bass. Because researchers have found that, during a concert, boosting the bass bumps up the boogying. The results appear in the journal Current Biology.Daniel Cameron: Music and musical rhythm have been kind of fascinating to me for a long time, since I was a kid. In particular, the way that they make us feel.Hopkin: Daniel Cameron is a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University. He also plays drums.Cameron: As a drummer, you’re interested in making the crowd want to move and feel good and give a good pleasurable time feel. And this is related to the work I do in science.Hopkin: Cameron and his colleagues want to understand how music can engender an almost irrepressible urge to feel our bodies in motion.Cameron: And we knew from anecdotal evidence and other experimental evidence that there was an association between bass and dancing.Hopkin: So, people who enjoy electronic dance music, or EDM, report that the thrumming bass produces a sensation that makes them want to move. And some studies have shown that our movements are more fine-tuned when we’re locked onto bass notes.Cameron: So, for example, if you have people tap along to a sequence of tones, their tapping is slightly more accurate, they’re more synchronized…when those tones are low in frequency compared to high in frequency.Hopkin: So the researchers set out to determine:Cameron: If you add more bass to music, will it cause more dancing?Hopkin: Now, they didn’t want to manipulate the bass line in a way that was obvious. Because then people might consciously decide to step up their stepping out.Cameron: That might be interesting…Hopkin: But it would also muddy the results…like if someone in a drug trial knows they’re getting the real deal and not a placebo.Cameron: So we wanted to do a subtle manipulation, a very consciously undetectable manipulation.Hopkin: So they broke out a set of very very low frequency speakers.Cameron: These are specialized speakers. Kind of like sub-subwoofers. People might have subwoofers as part of their stereo system. And these are speakers that play even lower frequencies than most systems are able to do. Even lower frequencies than we think are typically able to be heard.Hopkin: With their special speakers set up, the researchers staged a concert.Hopkin: That’s LIVE…L-I-V-E…for large, interactive virtual environment. It’s like a...[full transcript]
Cameron, D.J. et al. (2022) “Undetectable very-low frequency sound increases dancing at a live concert,” Current Biology, 32(21).
doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.09.035
封面图来源：Unsplash
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