跟读练习: Why California's musical road sounds terrible - 通过视频学习英语口语

If you drive down a certain stretch of highway in the California desert, you will hear music.

It's supposed to sound a little bit like this.

But instead, it sounds like this.

That was the musical road of Lancaster, California, and as you may have heard, it's a little bit out of tune.

A lot of money was spent on that road.

It was a publicity stunt for a car company who wanted to show off how clever they are.

And doing the calculations for something like that isn't really difficult.

A musical note is a vibration in the air at a particular frequency, and those vibrations can be made by a violin string or synthesized by a computer,

or, in this case, made by vehicle tyres hitting grooves in the road.

The closer the grooves are, the faster the vibrations, and the higher the note.

So take the speed limit, divide by the frequency of the note you want, and that's how often there should be a groove in the road.

And if people travel at the wrong speed, well, it shouldn't really matter.

It'll just be like slowing down or speeding up any other bit of music.

It'll be in the wrong key, but it'll still sound right to most people's ears.

It won't sound like that mess.

So, what went wrong?

At this point, I'm indebted to David Simmons Duffin, an assistant professor of physics at Caltech, whose interests include quantum field theories and playing Baroque violin,

because he was, as far as I can tell, the very first person to figure out what went wrong.

And the problem was probably the English language.

Whoever did the calculations said that the grooves should be so far apart, let's say four inches for the first note, and they meant that there should be a groove every four inches.

But whoever gave the instructions to the work crew said that the grooves should be four inches apart,

and that was interpreted as four inches between the end of one groove and the start of the next one.

itself.

But your ears definitely do include it.

The highest note on that section of the William Tell Overture should be one octave higher than the lowest.

That means the frequency should be doubled and the grooves should be half the distance apart.

And they are if you don't include the width of the groove itself.

That error means that every note is distorted not by a fraction of its value, like if you're travelling at the wrong speed, but by a constant amount, by the width of the grooves.

The higher the note, the greater the effect of that distortion.

And the result is the mess that you are about to hear for a second time.

And the really strange part?

This is the second musical road built in Lancaster, California.

The first one, built by the car company, was too close to residents who complained about the constant noise, and probably this note here.

So the city paved over it and rebuilt it to the exact same wrong blueprints.

That's a take.

That is a take right there.

And in order to celebrate that take, I'm going to put my foot down.

This is an SUV.

It doesn't do that.

什么是跟读法？

跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。

跟读练习: Why California's musical road sounds terrible - 通过视频学习英语口语

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什么是跟读法？