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  3. "Visual Music" is a fine-tuned, highly diverting, deceptively radical exhibition about the relationship of music and modern art,

"Visual Music" is a fine-tuned, highly diverting, deceptively radical exhibition about the relationship of music and modern art,

admin2010-03-25  99
问题     "Visual Music" is a fine-tuned, highly diverting, deceptively radical exhibition about the relationship of music and modern art, lately arrived here at the Hirshhorn Museum. In its hippy-trippy way, it rewrites a crucial chapter of history.
   Its subtitle is "Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900." Aristotle formulated the idea that each of the five senses -- smell, taste, touch, hearing and sight -- had its own proper and distinct sphere of activity. There were overlaps, he said (movement pertained both to sight and touch); and he speculated that the mysteries of color harmony might have something to do with musical harmony, an idea that would resonate for centuries. Musical harmony, as an expression of geometry, was thought to be useful to the study of art and architecture from the Renaissance on. But the notion that there was an essential separation among the sensual spheres persisted into the early 19th century. At the same time reports began to emerge of rare people who said they experienced two sensations simultaneously: they saw colors when they heard sounds, or they heard sounds when they ate something. The condition was called synaesthesia.
    It’s no coincidence that scientific interest in synaesthesia coincided with the Symbolist movement in Europe, with its stresses on metaphor, allusion and mystery. Synaesthesia was both metaphorical and mysterious. Scientists were puzzled. People who claimed to have it couldn’t agree about exactly what they experienced. "To ordinary individuals one of these accounts seems just as wild and lunatic as another but when the account of one seer is submitted to another seer," noted the Victorian psychologist and polymath Sir Francis Galton in 1883, "the latter is scandalized and almost angry at the heresy of the former."
   I have come across via the color historian John Gage an amusing account from some years later by the phonologist Roman Jakobson, who studied a multilingual woman with synaesthesia. The woman described to him perceiving colors when she heard consonants and vowels or even whole words: "As time went on words became simply sounds, differently colored, and the more outstanding one color was, the better it remained in my memory. That is why, on the other hand, I have great difficulty with short English words like jut, jug, lie, lag, etc.: their colors simply run together." Russian, she also told Jakobson, has "a lot of long, black and brown words," while German scientific expressions "are accompanied by a strange, dull yellowish glimmer."
What does the word "synaesthesia" refers to?
选项 A、It means that people may appreciate two kinds of beauty at the same time.
B、It means that people may enjoy beauty with all senses at the same time.
C、It holds that different spheres of senses may overlap.
D、It is thoroughly studied by modern science.
答案C
解析 “synaesthesia”中文译为“联觉”。选项A不对，这个词虽然在构词法上和审美同根，但意义不太相同。B不对，因为文中对联觉的解释中没提到是多种感官交错，只提到两种感官。D不对，因为文中明确提到“Synaesthesia was both metaphorical and mysterious．Scientists were puzzled．People who claimed to have it couldn’t agree about exactly what they experienced．”
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