英文阅读：音乐对植物生长有影响吗
悲伤的音乐能使人落泪，欢快激昂的曲调则会让人精神振奋。音乐对人有影响已经是广为接受的一种观点。可是，说音乐对植物的生长也有影响，你会相信吗?In 1973, a woman named Dorothy Retallack published a small book called The
Sound of Music and Plants. Her book detailed experiments that she had been
conducting at the Colorado Woman’s College in Denver using the school’s three
Biotronic Control Chambers. Mrs. Retallack placed plants in each chamber and
speakers through which she played sounds and particular styles of music. She
watched the plants and recorded their progress daily. She was astounded(大吃一惊) at
what she discovered.
Her first experiment was to simply play a constant tone. In the first of
the three chambers, she played a steady tone continuously for eight hours. In
the second, she played the tone for three hours intermittently, and in the third
chamber, she played no tone at all. The plants in the first chamber, with the
constant tone, died within fourteen days. The plants in the second chamber grew
abundantly and were extremely healthy, even more so than the plants in the third
chamber. This was a very interesting outcome, very similar to the results that
were obtained from experiments performed by the Muzak Corporation in the early
1940s to determine the effect of "background music" on factory workers. When
music was played continuously, the workers were more fatigued and less
productive, when played for several hours only, several times a day, the workers
were more productive, and more alert and attentive than when no music was
played.
For her next experiment, Mrs. Retallack used two chambers (and fresh
plants). She placed radios in each chamber. In one chamber, the radio was tuned
to a local rock station, and in the other the radio played a station that
featured soothing "middle-of-the-road" music. Only three hours of music was
played in each chamber. On the fifth day, she began noticing drastic changes. In
the chamber with the soothing music, the plants were growing healthily and their
stems were starting to bend towards the radio! In the rock chamber, half the
plants had small leaves and had grown gangly(细长的), while the others were
stunted(矮小的). After two weeks, the plants in the soothing-music chamber were
uniform in size, lush and green, and were leaning between 15 and 20 degrees
toward the radio. The plants in the rock chamber had grown extremely tall and
were drooping, the blooms had faded and the stems were bending away from the
radio. On the sixteenth day, all but a few plants in the rock chamber were in
the last stages of dying. In the other chamber, the plants were alive,
beautiful, and growing abundantly.
Mrs. Retallack’s next experiment was to create a tape of rock music by Jimi
Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, and Led Zeppelin. Again, the plants turned away from the
music. Thinking maybe it was the percussion in the rock music that was causing
the plants to lean away from the speakers, she performed an experiment playing a
song that was performed on steel drums. The plants in this experiment leaned
just slightly away from the speaker; however not as extremely as did the plants
in the rock chambers. When she performed the experiment again, this time with
the same song played by strings, the plants bent towards the speaker.
Next Mrs. Retallack tried another experiment again using the three
chambers. In one chamber she played North Indian classical music performed by
sitar(西他) and tabla(手鼓), in another she played Bach organ music, and in the
third, no music was played. The plants "liked" the North Indian classical music
the best. In both the Bach and sitar chambers, the plants leaned toward the
speakers, but he plants in the Indian music chamber leaned toward the speakers
the most.
She went on to experiment with other types of music. The plants showed no
reaction at all to country and western music, similarly to those in silent
chambers. However, the plants "liked" the jazz that she played them. She tried
an experiment using rock in one chamber, and "modern" classical music of
negative composers Arnold Schuberg and Anton Webern in another. The plants in
the rock chamber leaned 30 to 70 degrees away from the speakers and the plants
in the modern classical chamber leaned 10 to 15 degrees away.
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