Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/191

No. 2.]

The reproduction of sound is effected in the phonograph by contact between a needle fixed in a diaphragm and a wax cylinder on which an inscription has previously been made by another needle. Raising a lever raises the needle off the wax, and the arm bearing the diaphragm being movable, another contact may be made at any desired point on the cylinder. This makes it possible either to begin or to interrupt a phonographic reproduction at any instant of the flow of sound reproduced. Should we wish to grasp better what we have just heard, raising the lever while we move back the arm repeats it at once; should we wish to compare it with sound from another source, simply raising the lever silences the instrument. The phonograph used in this investigation was one of those run by electrical power, the rapidity of revolution of the cylinder being regulated by a screw increasing or decreasing the strength of the current entering the motor. The movement of this screw raises or lowers the pitch of the music reproduced by the phonograph at the same time that it quickens or slackens its time. In practice, the adjustment of the screw proves to be a very delicate means of temporarily tuning a phonograph note to any desired pitch within a considerable compass.

It is evident that if the sounds obtained from the phonograph can be relied upon as an accurate reproduction of those to which it has been exposed, the instrument is an invaluable apparatus for the investigation of primitive music. The phonograph brings vanished tones to actual hearing again just as photographs and casts bring visibly and tangibly before us the looks and shapes of things far away. By its aid the investigator can examine the sounds themselves of which a primitive musical performance has consisted, and in his study, at his leisure; he is no longer restricted to inferring the practice of the art more or less doubtfully from documentary evidence or from instrumental forms: he is no longer even dependent on his observations of such primitive performances as he may have been fortunate enough to hear, or on his memory of them. The phonograph places the music itself permanently at his command. Its reproductions may be indefinitely repeated; many parts of these inscriptions have in our examination been traversed perhaps a score of times; but notwithstanding these repetitions it has been impossible to detect the least deterioration in the reproduction. Whatever the life of a phonograph cylinder may be, it is far longer than suffices for the most careful examination of the inscribed sound. Moreover, as we have seen, the music preserved by the phonograph can be interrupted at any point. Both of these essentials of a stricter study are impossible in the case of actual playing or singing by primitive musicians. Our Chinamen, although no troublesome demands were made upon them, already began to grow restive during the second interview.

It cannot be claimed that the performance of the phonograph in its existing state leaves nothing to be desired. A harsh, scraping noise, very perceptible, although not loud enough to obscure the inscribed sound, is, as far as