说话声是人类听觉环境的一个非常重要的组成部分，这对广播播音员来说确实是一大安慰。在这个星球上，我们花在听别人讲话上的时间远远多过听其他声音的时间。而且我们不仅仅要接收别人讲话的信息；还要破译出别人没有说出口的信息，有时候仅仅是为了活动我们的嘴部肌肉。

ANNOUNCER: It’s rather reassuring for radio presenters that the human voice is such a crucial part of the human auditory environment. We all spend more time listening to voices, than to any other sound on the planet. And we are not just receiving spoken messages; we are decoding unspoken ones as well as sometimes just flexing our vocal muscles.
播音员：说话声是人类听觉环境的一个非常重要的组成部分，这对广播播音员来说确实是一大安慰。在这个星球上，我们花在听别人讲话上的时间远远多过听其他声音的时间。而且我们不仅仅要接收别人讲话的信息；还要破译出别人没有说出口的信息，有时候仅仅是为了活动我们的嘴部肌肉。

WOMAN A: A good voice is a healthy voice. It lets the individual do what ever he or she wants to do with his voice.
女士A：好的语音是健康的。它能够用声音让一个人做任何他或她想要做的事。

WOMAN B: A lot of people have at least a couple of octaves range which is just stunning what some people can produce. Not everybody of course is that versatile and again the qualities of voice can change so you can do an enormous amount with it.

女士B：很多人的声音拥有至少好几个八度的音域，有的人能发出让令人震耳欲聋的声音。当然并不是每个人都拥有这方面的天赋，而且人的音质是可以改变的，所以对此我们能作的有很多。

ANNOUNCER: As we’ll be finding out on this BBC discovery program how we hear other people’s voices and use them as a window on the mind of other speakers is an area of increasing interests to researchers. The way the vibrating folds of the larynges can be configured to strikingly individual effecters demonstrated rather well I think you’ll agree by Sten Ternstrom of KTH Stockholm’s Institute of Technology.
播音员：在本期的BBC《探索发现》节目中，我们将探索一下我们是如何听到别人说话的声音，并将这些声音作为判断其他说话人情绪的标志。研究人员对这个领域有着越来越浓厚的兴趣。我们喉部的声带振动方式可以形成和表现出明显的个体差异，在这一点上我想你一定会赞同斯德哥尔摩KTH皇家理工学院的斯特恩•特恩斯罗姆教授。

STEN TANSTROM: You can have different degrees of press for example, going from very breathy where I am not pushing my vocal folds at all, to a normal sort of voice: “and if I press them together I get a kind of pressed voice like this”. Or you can have a very breathy voice.
斯特恩•特恩斯罗姆：你可以有好多种不同的挤压程度，例如从呼气声极大的声音（当我完全不挤压声带时），到很普通的声音：“如果我把声带完全挤压到一起我就会发出这样的压迫声音。”反之你也可以发出极大的呼气声。

GUY: But these voices are to some degree involuntarily aren’t they? I mean your doing rather brilliant sort of impersonation. But the fact is that we all have a natural disposition as it was where the voices is concerned.
盖伊：但是在某些程度上，这些声音都是不自觉发出的，不是吗？我是说你刚才做的只是非常逼真的模拟而已。但事实上关于声音我们每个人都有一个自然禀性。

STEN TANSTROM: Well just like your face is unique, the details of your vocal track are also unique and it’s a very interesting fact that this uniqueness leaves a sort of imprint on the sound wave as well. And you will make certain assumptions as to who I am and what I am like.

斯特恩•特恩斯罗姆：就像每个人都有一张独一无二的脸一样，我们声道的细节也是独一无二的。并且非常有趣的是这种唯一性在我们发出的声波中也烙上了痕迹。所以你可以由我的声音猜出我是谁或我是个什么样的人。

ANNOUNCER: What any of us are like has a lot to do with how our voices sound. And there is a surprising consensus on the qualities we associate with them. According to Anita Macalister, voice development specialists also at KTH, there are good voices and not such good ones.

播音员：我们每个人的性格与我们发出的声音有很大的联系。令人惊奇的是，如果我们将很多人的音质放在一起比较，我们会发现他们具有惊人的一致性。根据KTH另一位语音发展学专家——安尼塔•麦卡利斯特的研究，好听的和不好听的声音都是存在的。

ANITA MACALISTER: Ask people to rate a voice and if this is a normal voice, if this is a very good voice or a bad voice, that’s something that everyone can do. And we seem to cluster positive aspects of a person and together with positive aspects of a voice. But maybe in some cultures, we are more tolerant to what we in Scandinavia would say, is a deviant voice.
安尼塔•麦卡利斯特：让人们对声音划分等级，判断这个是正常的声音，那个是非常好听或不好听的声音，这是人人都能做的简单事。我们似乎总是把人的积极方面和声音的好听联系在一起。但是也许在有的文化地域，例如斯堪的纳维亚半岛，我们很难容忍那种不正常的声音。

GUY: Deviant? What’s a deviant voice?
盖伊：不正常？什么是不正常的声音？

ANITA MACALISTER: Argh! (funny noises) You know something like that doesn’t have a regular vibration. A lot of breathiness, maybe a lot of hyper function…you know something like this, a strained voice. I mean if you look at the Mediterranean area you have horse hyper functional quality that is due to a little fold on the vocal fold that interferes with the vibration of the vocal folds. This makes the voice breathy and horse, and there are a lot of very famous Italians singers for instance that have this horse quality. So I mean it can have a function with that horse quality and make a lot of money.
安尼塔•麦卡利斯特：嘿！（古怪的声音）你知道像这种声音不是正常振动发声的。夹杂了许多呼吸声，可能产生很多新功能……像这种是假声。我指的是如果你在地中海地区，你会听到一种像马一样呼吸声很重的音质，原因是那里的人们声带有一点点折叠，影响了其振动发声。这就使得声音夹杂着强烈的呼吸声，例如有很多著名的意大利音乐家就是这种音质。所以我的意思是这种音质也可以具有一定的功能，它可以帮你赚大钱。

GUY: We are very very good at picking even the idiosyncratic properties of a person that make this person unique like the size, the gender of the person, but also age. We are very good at picking up the age from a person’s voice. The region of origin, the social control status and so and so forth. We are very good at picking from very brief vocalization the effective state of a person. Is the person happy, sad, angry, we have developed exquisite mechanisms to process this information.
盖伊：我们非常善于发掘一个人的异常性，例如体格，性别和年龄等这些让他与众不同的特性。我们非常善于通过一个人的声音判断他的年龄，他的家乡，社会地位等等。通过简单的发声我们就能够推测出一个人的实际状态。他是高兴，悲伤，还是生气？我们已经研究出精密机制来处理这些信息。

ANNOUNCER: So as soon as we start to speak, we bombard a potential listener with information about ourselves. Voice recognition plays a major part in our social interaction and Pascal Bella, a psychologist at Glazco University, is currently trying to uncover the cerebral architecture of this process by using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans of the brain to observe the reactions of test volunteers to the emotional content of what they are hearing.
播音员：因此只要我们一开口讲话，我们就开始向聆听者传递着关于我们自身的信息。声音识别在我们的社交活动中起着非常重要的作用。帕斯卡•贝拉是葛兰素大学的一位心理学者，她最近正在试图揭开在这一过程中人类大脑皮层结构之谜，方法是通过磁共振（MRI）扫描观察志愿者在听到令人产生情绪的内容后大脑做出的反应。

PASCAL BELLA: When we compare the response to different types of sounds, we see that there are different responses in several parts of the cortex. And also in a very important structures that is known to have a crucial role in processing emotional information, they omit that. This work on omit dala of role on omit dala processing emotional information mostly comes from work with faces: effective face, happy faces, sad faces, and so on. What we showed in this very recent work is that you have the same type of the activation of the amygdale for vocal emotions, which again suggest really there is part in organization of these two types of information. Voices, emotional content either positive or negative, induces a very strong activity, in this amygdale. It makes a lot of sense that the same main type of information that are extracted from both faces and voices are analyzed following exactly similar principles. There’s several basic emotional categories like fear, anger, disgust, and so on, are very well recognized either from face expression or from vocal expression as well.
帕斯卡•贝拉：我们将人们对待不同种声音做出的反应进行对比后，发现在他们大脑皮层的几个部位产生了不同反应。同时我们发现了在处理情感信息过程中起关键作用的一个重要结构。这种处理情感信息的过程大部分是通过和脸部的实际面部表情合作实现的：高兴的表情，悲伤的表情等等。我们在这一周所展示的就是我们对声音情绪有着同一种杏仁孔活性，再一次证实这两种信息组成之间是有联系的。人类声音，无论其内容是积极还是消极的，都在这个杏仁孔中包含了一种强烈的活性。这样就能解释为什么从两种表情和声音中我们可以得出同一种信息类型，其分析过程基本上是严格按照以下规则。我们有几种最基本的情绪分类，如恐惧，生气，厌恶等等，他们可以通过面部表情或声音表达中清楚的区分开来。

ANNOUNCER: So it seems that the voice can operate like a silent movie as a sequence of wordless gestures or a face made up of sounds.
播音员：因此，就像无声电影一样，人类声音似乎也可以看作是由声音符号组成的一系列无言的手势或表情。

单词注释：

auditory adj.听觉的
stunning adj.震耳欲聋的
versatile adj.多才多艺的
larynges n.喉
deviant adj.不正常的
idiosyncratic adj.特殊物质的，特殊的，异质的
bombard v.炮轰，轰击
amygdale n.杏仁孔