Everyone desires happiness, and one of the important prerequisites for a happy life is to have good emotional qualities. Under the same material living standards, a person with delicate, sensitive, and rich emotions has a much higher quality of life than a person who is boring, boring, and numb. In addition, the underlying reasons why many people encounter problems in life and work may also stem from insufficient perceptual qualities. The cultivation of perceptual qualities can be achieved through art education.
It seems to be a conclusion that rational quality is more important than perceptual quality. But Zhou Haihong, a professor at the Central Conservatory of Music, has been committed to using art education, especially music education, to improve people's perceptual qualities. He believes that good personal perceptual quality is the prerequisite for a happy life, and the national perceptual quality is the guarantee for creating modern civilization. A life without rich perceptual experience is relatively boring, a life without art is relatively incomplete, and a life without the ability to enjoy music is relatively regrettable.
So, what exactly is perceptual quality? What is the measure of perceptual quality? What role does art, especially music, play in improving people's emotional quality? What significance does the improvement of perceptual quality have to the improvement of people's comprehensive quality and even future social development? Perceptual quality affects the experience of happiness and even affects the process of material civilization
Liaoning Daily: Hello, Professor Zhou! Many people are still unfamiliar with the topic of perceptual quality. Can you explain in detail what perceptual quality is?
Zhou Haihong: Perceptual quality is composed of four aspects: perceptual ability, perceptual needs, habits and knowledge. Among them, perceptual ability and perceptual needs are the most important. They are the core content of perceptual quality and the measure of perceptual quality. important standard of quality. A person with high perceptual quality first has strong perceptual ability, has feelings, and is not numb; secondly, he has high perceptual requirements, pursues good feelings, and cannot tolerate bad feelings. Of course, personal behavioral habits and knowledge composition are also important parts and peripheral supports that constitute perceptual quality.
Liaoning Daily: After your introduction, we have a preliminary conceptual understanding of perceptual quality, but it still feels a bit abstract. Can you further introduce to us the importance of perceptual quality and How does it manifest itself in our lives and work?
Zhou Haihong: Perceptual quality is very important for the development of individuals and the entire society.
From a personal perspective, good perceptual experience is a concrete manifestation of a happy life. Personal perceptual quality is the condition for achieving a happy life. Without perceptual quality, there is no ability to experience the beauty of life.
I don’t know if you have ever seen such a person: he has a good job, a high salary, a car, a house, status, and reputation. In short, he should have everything in life. He has everything. But if you look at his life, he is not interested in anything. He just goes home after work. You ask him to listen to music, but he doesn’t understand; to watch movies, he thinks it’s all made up; when you ask him to travel, he feels tired and panicked; to chat with someone, he finds it boring… he has everything he should have in life. , do you say he is happy? He is unhappy, he has no sense of happiness, why? He was numb because he didn't feel anything. Therefore, if a perfect person wants to obtain happiness throughout his life, he must not only have the qualities to obtain the conditions for happiness, but also the qualities to experience the feeling of happiness.
From a social group perspective, a nation without perceptual qualities will not have the ability to create a good perceptual environment, nor will it have the ability to create a high-level material civilization.
For example, most of our modern buildings have no artistic beauty or characteristics; therefore, it is difficult for us to innovate technology and most of them "OEM" for others; therefore, we have no world-class buildings in recent years. Writers and poets appeared; as a result, we and nature became more and more disharmonious. The gap between us and developed countries not only lies in economic and technological aspects, but also in the lack of requirements for the perceptual quality of the environment by our citizens!
Because people lack perceptual qualities and have no requirements for a good perceptual environment, the environment is dirty, messy, and poor. Although the country spends a lot of effort on health and environmental inspections every year, inspections alone cannot create a civilized environment. The realization of a civilized environment also requires the improvement of the perceptual quality of the people. Art education improves perceptual quality and appreciates music, which is the most convenient way to improve people's life track. So, how can we improve our perceptual quality?
Zhou Haihong: The improvement of perceptual quality must be achieved through art education. Art has an irreplaceable function in human society. It can improve human perceptual environment, enable people to enjoy the beauty of life, cultivate people's perceptual qualities, make people have requirements for a good perceptual environment, and then promote the development of perceptual civilization in human society. . The core value of art education lies in cultivating national perceptual quality and perceptual wisdom.
Liaoning Daily: The forms of art are rich and colorful. What kind of art is more conducive to improving perceptual quality?
Zhou Haihong: In fact, all art training can improve people's perceptual qualities, but among all art forms, music is more convenient for improving people's perceptual qualities. Of all human enjoyments, music is the one that requires the least amount of time. Traveling takes time, playing cards takes time, eating takes time, and exercising takes time.
Music does not require a dedicated time: you can listen to it when you are running or walking, when you are washing dishes and mopping the floor, or when you are shopping for food and cooking. Music can be enjoyed anytime and anywhere.
More importantly, music plays various roles in our lives. For example, music can adjust people's behavior. Have you ever heard that when music is played in the underground passages and overpasses of a large European city, the crime rate in these places plummets? At this time, music is more effective than the police. This has a psychological reason. Beautiful musical accompaniment interferes with the emotional tension necessary for crime. Everything people do must be supported by emotions. Music changes people's behavior by changing their emotions.
In addition, music is also a very good way to relieve mental stress. In the field of music, there is a profession called music therapy. There is a principle in this profession called the "synchronicity principle", which means that the music given to you must be consistent with your current mental state.
Liaoning Daily: If we want to improve our emotional quality through music, should we choose popular songs, classical music or elegant music?
Zhou Haihong: Different music meets people’s different needs, and a colorful life requires colorful music. Everyone should listen to both pop music (also called popular music) and classical music, but be careful not to only appreciate some of the popular music nowadays. If you want to improve your perceptual quality, it is not enough to just listen to popular music. You should also listen to more classical music, elegant music, etc. Here we refer to these music as serious music.
Popular music is like "soft drinks". Soft drinks feel sweet and greasy no matter when and who drinks them, but they are difficult to last. Serious music, on the other hand, is more like a wide variety of "fine wine". It is spicy, sweet and bitter when you first taste it, and then you feel it is acceptable. The most important thing is that the world of serious music is rich and colorful. There are countless corresponding works waiting for you for every mood. It goes beyond simple sensory pleasure, triggering deep feelings and shocks in people's hearts. It’s not difficult to understand serious music, just follow people’s instinctive reactions
Liaoning Daily: For the general public, serious music is too difficult to understand. Do you have any better way to help everyone understand serious music? Can you at least listen to the music?
Zhou Haihong: Compared with pop music, serious music seems difficult to understand. In fact, serious music is not as difficult to understand as people think. The reason why people across the country think that serious music is generally difficult to understand is mainly because people generally have misunderstandings about appreciating serious music: they believe that appreciating serious music must be understood in a literary and artistic way, and they worry that they cannot "understand it correctly" Music, the understanding of music is "wrong" and "superficial", coupled with the artificial mystery shrouded in serious music, pushing many people out of the door of music art.
In addition, because music has no spatial modeling and cannot convey visual images, and unlike language, it is not a sound symbol, so music cannot express clear conceptual and logical content. It is precisely because of this nature of music that most listeners cannot understand music and cannot tell what the music expresses. Therefore, the incomprehensible reason does not mean that the audience has a poor music appreciation level, has no musical ability, or lacks musical accomplishment, but that the music itself cannot directly convey visual and semantic content.
In fact, appreciating serious music can be very simple, that is, there is no need to "understand" it. We just need to close our eyes, open our ears, and enjoy the beauty of the music. Appreciating music does not necessarily require hearing clear concepts or visual content, nor does it need to explain music in a literary and artistic way.
Liaoning Daily: For ordinary people, serious music does not need to be understood or understood?
Zhou Haihong: Of course not. Not only can serious music be understood, but it is also not difficult to understand. All you need to do is understand the theory of synesthesia. What is "synesthesia"? You may be unfamiliar with this word. Let me give you an example. For example, let’s say I have two pieces of candy, one piece of chocolate, one piece of mint candy, and two voices, one is the alto and the other is the treble. Which of these two sounds do you think sounds like chocolate and which sounds like mints? Most people feel that the midrange sounds like chocolate and the treble sounds like mints. At this time, a feeling of hearing and a feeling of taste are connected. This is "synesthesia".
Synesthesia is an instinctive reaction and an innate feeling. It is precisely because of the reaction mechanism of "synesthesia" in people's psychological activities that music, an art of pure sound, can express ideas, philosophy, emotions, moods, images, scenes, stories, etc., and other auditory aspects. external content. Music relies on synesthesia to express various things. In fact, the composer relies on this feeling to select and organize sounds to express what he wants to express, and we, the listeners, also feel the composer's intention in the music melody under the influence of the same psychological rules. Therefore, let us mobilize our synesthesia to truly "understand" music, especially serious music, cultivate our perceptual qualities, experience happiness in life, and know how to enjoy the beauty in life.