翻译：陈美娟

审校：张清越

Next time you find yourself at a karaoke bar, let me suggest a song:

Otis Redding's "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay."

下次你要是发现自己来到了K吧，我建议你点一首歌：奥蒂斯·雷丁的《坐在海湾的码头上》。

The reason? It's got whistling in it. So you'll sound better. Because new research out in the journal Royal Society Open Science says it's easier to accurately whistle a melody than it is to sing it. [Michel Belyk, Joseph F. Johnson and Sonja A. Kotz, Poor neuro-motor tuning of the human larynx: a comparison of sung and whistled pitch imitation]

为什么呢？因为这首歌有口哨声，所以你的声音听着会更好。《皇家学会开放科学》杂志上的新研究表明，准确地吹口哨比唱出来更容易。

"This was a bit of a surprise because we spend all day using our voices. Most of the time it's for speech, but we do all sorts of subtle and interesting things with speech." Michel Belyk is a neuroscientist at at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Ontario, Canada. 

“这让人有点吃惊，毕竟我们整天都在用嗓子说话。我们的嗓音大部分时间都是用来说话的，但是我们用它来做各种微妙有趣的事情。”来自加拿大安大略省荷兰布洛维尤儿童康复医院的神经科学家米歇尔·贝利克这样说道。

"As I'm speaking now I’m placing emphasis on certain words, stress on certain syllables. You can tell I'm making a statement verses asking a question by the tone of my voice. These are all very subtle uses of the voice that we have tons and tons of practice with, much more so probably than whistling. And yet, people were a little better with the whistle."

“当我现在说话的时候，我在强调某些单词和某些音节。你能通过我的音调分辨出我是在陈述还是在提问。这些都是使用声音的微妙方式，我们对此的运用有大把大把的实践经历，应当比口哨的效果更好。然而，人们还是更善于吹口哨。”

For the study, Belyk and his team asked 28 undergrads, with varying levels of music and singing experience, to imitate a melody like this < >, by either whistling or singing. And the  singing was more consistently out of tune, regardless of musical level. Michel's theory on that: 

在这项研究中，贝利克和他的团队要求28名有不同等级声乐和演唱经验的学生，通过吹口哨或唱歌来模仿类似（旋律样本）这样的声音。不管他们音乐水平如何，唱歌总是更容易走调。据此米歇尔得出他的结论：

"What I think is going on here, even though we don't practice whistling, we have a long evolutionary history of having fine-grained control of the lips. Whereas control of the larynx has mostly evolved after humans split from other primates."

“我一直想的是，即使我们不练习吹口哨，我们人类也曾有一个漫长的控制唇部的进化历史。而人类对喉部的控制主要是在与其他灵长类动物分离后才开始进化的。”

So next time you feel like you're really nailing that rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody"… just imagine how good you'd sound if you whistled. 

所以下次你感觉你完美地唱出了《波西米亚狂想曲》的时候…想象一下你用口哨吹出来的有多好听吧。