IELTS READING

TOPIC: MUSIC

What is music?
A. Music has probably existed for as long as man has been human, and it certainly
predates civilization by tens of millennia. Yet even today there is no clear definition of
exactly what music is. For example, birdsong is certainly melodic, but it is not tuneful,
and it is not created with the intention of being musical (in fact it is sometimes meant to
sound threatening) - therefore does it count as music?

B. On the other hand, some modern composers have been challenging the idea that
music should be arranged in a pleasant manner with the notes falling in an orderly
succession. Others, famously the avant-garde composer John Cage have even used
silence and called the result music. As a result, there is no one definition of music.
Perhaps it should be said that music, like beauty, is what the person who sees or hears it
believes it to be.

C. Music is divided in many ways. Music itself is split into notes, clefts, quavers, and
semi-demi quavers. Ancient and medieval musicologists believed that these notes could
be arranged 'horizontally' into melody (making notes that match on the same scale) and
'vertically' (going up and down the scales to create harmony). Another very basic
measurement of music is the 'pulse'. This is present in almost all forms of music, and is
particularly strong in modern popular music. The pulse is the regular beat which runs
through a tune. When you tap your foot or clap your hands in time to a song, you are
beating out the pulse of that song.

D. Another way of dividing music is by genre. Even a child who does not know that
(for example) rock and roll and classical music are different genres will be instantly
aware that these are very different sounds; though he will not be aware that one is a
percussion-led melody while the other emphasizes harmony over rhythm and timbre.
Each genre of music has numerous sub-divisions. Classical music is divided by type -
for example, symphonies, concertos and operas, and by sub-genre, for example,
baroque and Gregorian chant. Just to make it more fun, modern musicians have also
been experimenting with crossover music, so that we get Beatles tunes played by
classical orchestras, and groups like Queen using operatic themes in songs such as
'Bohemian rhapsody'.

E. Almost all music is a collaboration between the composer, and the performer, while
song requires a lyricist to write the words as well. Sometimes old tunes are adapted for
new lyrics - for example, the song 'Happy Birthday' is based on a tune originally called
'Have a nice Day'. At other times a performer might produce a song in a manner which
the original composer would not recognize. (A famous example is the punk rock band
the Sex Pistols performing the British national anthem 'God save the Queen'.)
F. This is because the composer and lyricist have to leave the performer some freedom
to perform in the way that suits him or her best. While many classical compositions
have notes stressing how a piece should be performed (for example a piece played 'con
brio' should be light and lively) in the end, what the listener hears is the work of the
performer. Jazz music has fully accepted this, and jazz performers are not only expected
to put their own interpretation on a piece, but are expected to play even the same piece
with some variation every time.

G. Many studies of music do not take into account where the music is to be played and
who the audience will be. This is a major mistake, as the audience is very much a part of
the musical experience. Any jazz fan will tell you that jazz is best experienced in small
smoky bars sometime after midnight, while a classical fan will spend time and money
making sure that the music on his stereo comes as close as possible to the sound in a
large concert hall. Some music, such as dance music, is designed to be interactive, while
other music is designed to remain in the background, smoothing out harsh sounds and
creating a mood. This is often the case with cinema music - this powerfully changes the
mood of the audience, yet remains so much in the background that many cinema goers
are unaware that the music is actually playing.

H. Music is very much a part of human existence, and we are fortunate today in having
music of whatever kind we choose instantly available at the touch of a button. Yet spare
a thought for those who still cannot take advantage of this bounty. This includes not
only the deaf, but those people who are somehow unable to understand or recognize
music when they hear it. A famous example is United President Ulysses Grant, who
famously said 'I can recognise two tunes. One is 'Yankee doodle' and the other one
isn't.'

Questions 1-3
Choose which of these sentences is closest to the meaning in the text.
Write A, B or C on your answer sheet (1-3)
1. A) Modern composers do not always want their music to sound pleasant
B) Some modern composers do not want their music to be enjoyable
C) A modern musical composition should not be orderly
2. A) Crossover music is when classical orchestras play modern tunes
B) Crossover music moves between musical genres
C) Crossover music is a modern musical genre
3. A) Performers, lyricists and composers each have a separate function
B) Performers of a song will need to become lyricists
C) Composers instruct musicians to play their work 'con brio'.

Questions 4-7
Match the following groups of words (4-7) with one of the words in the box
opposite(A- F).

4. Rock and roll, classical music, jazz A. Collaborators

5. Composer, lyricist, performer B. John Cage
6. Symphony, concerto, opera C. Classical
7. Cinemagoer, Jazz fan, dancer D. Baroque
E. Audience
F. Genres

Questions 8- 12
The reading passage has 8 paragraphs which are numbered A-H.
On your answer sheet write the letter of the paragraph which contains the following
information (You can choose a paragraph more than once).
8. People can tell genres of music apart even without musical training.
9. Where you hear music can be as important as the skill of the performer.
10. Music has been a part of human existence for many thousands of years.
11. A piece of music might have more than one set of words to go with it.
12. Some people cannot tell the difference between classical music and birdsong.

Music
Language We All Speak
Section A:
Music is one of the human species relatively few universal abilities. Without formal
training, any individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager has the ability
to recognize music and, in some fashion, to make it. Why this should be so is a mystery.
After all, music isn’t necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction,
it does so only in highly indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere-but for
reasons that are more obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can
organize a migration across Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate
at night even when you can’t see each other. Modern culture, in all its technological
extravagance, springs directly from the human talent for manipulating symbols and
syntax. Scientists have always been intrigued by the connection between music and
language. Yet over the years, words and melody have acquired a vastly different status
in the lab and the seminar room. While language has long been considered essential to
unlocking the mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as an
evolutionary frippery – mere “auditory cheesecake,” as the Harvard cognitive scientist
Steven Pinker puts it.

Section B:
But thanks to a decade-long ware of neuroscience research, that tune is changing. A flurry
of recent publications suggests that language and music may equally be able to tell us
who we are and where we’re from – not just emotionally, but biologically. In July, the
journal Nature Neuroscience devoted a special issue to the topic. And in an article in the
August 6 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale
Purves of Duke University argued that the sounds of music and the sounds of language
are intricately connected.
To grasp the originality of this idea, it’s necessary to realize two things about how music
has traditionally been understood. First, musicologists have long emphasized that while
each culture stamps a special identity onto its music; the music itself has some universal
qualities. For example, in virtually all cultures sound is divided into some or all of the 12
intervals that make up the chromatic scale – that is, the scale represented by the keys on
a piano. For centuries, observers have attributed this preference for certain combinations
of tones to the mathematical properties of sound itself. Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras
was the first to note a direct relationship between the harmoniousness of a tone
combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced it. For example, a
plucked string will always play an octave lower than a similar string half its size, and a
fifth lower than a similar string two-thirds it’s length. This link between simple ratios and
harmony ahs influenced music theory ever since.

Section C:
This music-is-moth idea often accompanied by the notion that music formally speaking
at least exists apart from the world in which it was created. Writing recently in The New
York Review of Books, pianist and critic Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notion
that while painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of the natural world,
and writing describes thoughts and feelings we are all familiar with, music is entirely
abstracted from the world in which we live. Neither idea is right, according to David
Schwartz and his colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not
by elegant algorithms or ration but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in
particular – which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage. “The explanation of
music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in
numbers per se,” says Schwartz.
Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analyzed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety
of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus
only on the raw sound, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning and sliced
sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech,
they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set
of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the
building blocks of music are to be found in speech.
Far from being abstract, music presents a strange analogue to the patterns created by the
sounds of speech. “Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural
world,” says Schwartz. “It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts
emulate the visual environment.” In music, we hear the echo of our basic sound-making
instrument – the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simple; still than
Pythagoras’s mathematical equations. We like the sounds that are familiar to us-
specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us.
This brings up some chicken-or-egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates
speech directly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that language evolved
first. It’s also conceivable that music came first and language is in effect an Imitation of
the song – that in everyday speech we hit the musical notes we especially like.
Alternately, it may be that music imitates the general products of the human sound-
making system, which just happens to be mostly speech. “We can’t know this,” says
Schwartz. “What we do know is that they both come from the same system, and it is this
that shapes our preferences.”

Section D:
Schwartz’s study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals
understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of “music” in the
natural world- birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronized chimpanzee hooting
previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don’t show a great affinity for
the human variety of music-making. Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard
argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don’t create or perceive music
the way we do. The act that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is
evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific
chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally
recognize their own tunes – a narrow repertoire – but don’t generate novel melodies as
we do. There are no avian Mozarts.
But what’s been played to the animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve
preferences for sound as we do – based upon the soundscape in which they live – then
their “music” would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way, our scales
derive from human utterances, a cat’s idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and
meows. To demonstrate that animals don’t appreciate sounds the way we do, we’d need
evidence that they don’t respond to “music” constructed from their own sound
environment.

Section E:
No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent
is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in
our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the
University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special
issue.
For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to
“regulate infants’ emotional states.” Trehub says. Regardless of what language they
speak, the voice all mothers use with babies is the same: “something between speech and
song.” This kind of communication “puts the baby in a trance-like state, which may
proceed to sleep or extended periods of rapture.” So if the babies of the world could
understand the latest research on language and music, they probably wouldn’t be very
surprised. The upshot, says Trehub, is that music maybe even more of a necessity than
we realize.

Questions 13-17
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.

List of Headings
i Animal sometimes make music.
ii Recent research on music
iii Culture embedded in music
iv Historical theories review
v Communication in music with animals
vi Contrast between music and language
vii Questions on a biological link with human and music
viii Music is good for babies.

13 Paragraph A
14 Paragraph B
15 Paragraph C
16 Paragraph D
17 Paragraph E

Questions 18-24
Look at the following people and list of statements below.
Match each person with the correct statement.

List of Statements
A Music exists outside of the world in which it is created
B Music has a common feature though cultural influences affect
C Humans need music.
D Music priority connects to the disordered sound around.
E Discovery of mathematical musical foundation.
F Music is not treated equally well compared with the language
G Humans and monkeys have similar traits in perceiving sound.

18 Steven Pinker
19 Musicologists
20 Greek philosopher Pythagoras
21 Schwartz, Howe, and Purves
22 Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott
23 Charles Rosen
24 Sandra Trehub

Questions 25-26
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D
Write your answers in boxes 25-26 on your answer sheet.

25 Why was the study of animal’s music uncertain?

A Animals don’t have the same auditory system as humans.
B Experiments on animal’s music are limited.
C tunes are impossible for the animal to make up.
D Animals don’t have the spontaneous ability for the tests.
26 what is the main subject of this passage?
A Language and psychology.
B Music formation.
C Role of music in human society.
D Music experiments for animals.

IELTS SPEAKING TASK CARD

PART 1.
Do you often (like to) listen to music? Or Do you like listening to music?
When do you listen to music?
How much time do you spend listening to music every day?
What kinds of music do you like to listen to? Or What’s your favorite kind of music?
Have you ever been to a concert before?
Do you like to listen to live music or recorded music?
When did you start listening to this type of music?

Where do you listen to it?

How do you feel when you listen to this music?

Have you ever learned to play a musical instrument?

Is music an important subject at school in your country?

Did you often listen to music when you were a child? (If yes give details.)

What kinds of music are (most) popular in your country?

Do you like traditional songs?

PART 2.
Your own notes:

PART 3
1. Do you think pop stars can be a bad influence on young people? (Can you give some
examples?)
2. How important is it to learn how to play music when you are young? (Why?)

3. How much does the internet influence how you listen to music? (Do you think it will
do so more in the future?)

4. Is foreign music or music from your country more popular with people your age?
(Why do you think that is?)

5. Recently many singers and groups have first become famous through television
talent shows. What do you think about this?
6. What do you think about illegal downloading of music? (What should be done about
it?)

7. What would the advantages and disadvantages of being stricter about illegal
downloading of music be? (Would it generally be a good thing?)

8. Can you think of any bad effects of listening to music with headphones? (Is it worth it
anyway?)

9. Do you think it is possible to learn another language from listening to music in that
language? Why/ why not?

10. Do you think music while you are studying generally helps or not? (Why?)

11. Do you think the government needs to do more to preserve traditional music? (What
could they do?)

Summary:
3 things you remember about the lesson today
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2 things you can appy

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1 thing you would love to know more

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