科学美国人60秒 请一位音乐家来解开鸡尾酒会的喧嚣（在线收听）

The 2016 presidential candidates have subjected voters nationwide to a cognitive challenge: can you untangle what one candidate is saying while the others talk over him? That challenge is a test of something called the cocktail party problem, or "speech-on-speech perception." Which researchers in The Netherlands recently investigated, with a group of 18 musicians and 20 nonmusicians—to see if musicians are any better at it.

2016年各位总统候选人让全国各地的选民面临这样一个认知难题：你能从一大堆声音中区分出总统侯选人的声音吗?这个难题被称为鸡尾酒会问题，或者“言语认知”。最近荷兰研究人员调查了18名音乐家以及20名非音乐人士，来验证是否音乐家在声音分辨方面更有优势。

The scientists played the study subjects a sample of one speaker masking another—for example, try to follow what the second speaker is saying: Except they used Dutch samples. Anyway, the participants listened to this multi-voice babble with headphones, then attempted to repeat the target sentence, to see how many words they could make out. And it turns out musicians scored significantly higher than non-musicians did in deciphering the target phrase. The study is in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

科学家为研究对象播放了语音样本，其中一位发言人的声音掩盖了另一位发言人的声音——而实验对象需要理解第二位发言人的讲话——如果第二位发言人讲的是荷兰语，那么就算了。总之，这些实验对象带着耳机听了多个人含糊不清的说话，然后试图重复目标语句，以验证自己理解的程度。结果表名，在破译目标词组方面，音乐家得分远高于非音乐人士。该研究结果发表在《美国声学学会》杂志上。

Turns out musicians might be better at something called "stream segregation"—separating out one meaningful audio stream among others. "And this is the case indeed for musicians when they want to listen to hear out one specific instrument, within a group of instruments." Etienne Gaudrain, a hearing scientist at University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands. His co-author, Deniz Ba?kent agreed. "Anecdotally, when I speak to my musician friends, they do indeed mention situations like this, that they say they can switch their attention easily to either hear one stream, like from an orchestra piece or a band, or they can also combine patterns. So this requires quite a lot of cognitive control to be able to hear one stream or two streams together or to hear all of them together, but we think they are very well trained in this kind of skill.”

研究结果表明，音乐家更擅长区分声音流——在嘈杂的声音流中区分出有意义的声音流。“实际上，这就像音乐家在想要辨别某种特定的乐器的声音。”埃蒂安是荷兰格罗宁根大学医学中心的科学家，这样说到。他文章的合作者Deniz Ba?kent对他的观点也表示赞同。“在我和自己的音乐方面的朋友们谈到这个情况时，他们会讲到这样的情景，自己可以将注意力从管弦乐、乐队等一种声音流中进行转换，也可以同时听多种声音。这就要求严格控制自己的认知来听一种或两种声音流，或者听所有的声音流。我们认为他们在这方面的技能非常的优秀。

It's unclear whether this ability helps the candidates much. Neither Mike Huckabee, who plays bass in the band "Capitol Offense," nor Martin O'Malley, who strums and croons in "O'Malley's March," made it far enough to really exercise their ears.

尚不清楚这项技能能否帮助各位候选者。麦克·哈克比，在乐队演奏低音“国会进攻”以及马丁·奥马利，乱弹低吟浅唱“奥马利的三月”，真的不足以锻炼他们的耳朵。