Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/192

176 my experience goes, the constant accompaniment of a phonographic reproduction; and noises of other kinds occasionally make themselves heard.

Nor is the reproduction of musical tone in the phonograph by any means a perfect one. Beauty of timbre is very largely lost therein. This is, perhaps, in part due to the rapid quavering to which a phonograph note seems always subject, and which is very likely both a very small and quick waxing and waning of intensity and a very minute wavering in pitch, the latter being the result of the former. Although for this reason a phonograph note is never critically agreeable, yet tone-color of marked character remains readily recognizable therein. In this respect the phonographic cylinder outdoes the photographic plate which has never been able as yet to reproduce visual color at all, but at most only the distribution of light in the subject.

But these impurities of tone seriously detract from only the aesthetic, and not the scientific, value of a phonographic reproduction. It remains to ask whether the phonograph accurately reproduces the sequence of pitch in a music. If it does this, it will also reproduce its scheme of time, the other fundamental element in musical texture. Evidently in this respect the accuracy of the instrument is considerable: else the vocal selections, cornet solos, brass band pieces, etc., etc., which we hear to our greater or less satisfaction in phonographic exhibitions, would be beyond its powers. In order to determine this point more exactly, a test was made with the specially tuned harmonium invented by the late A. J. Ellis, and known to the readers of his translation of Helmholtz's Sensations of Tone as the Harmonical. One of the intervals embodied between adjacent notes of this instrument is that called the Syntonic Comma, $8⁄8$$1⁄0$, a difference of pitch of only 22 cents, less than a quarter of a tempered semitone. The Harmonical was set against the table on which the phonograph was placed, in such a manner that it could be played upon with the right hand while the left managed the phonograph. The latter instrument being adjusted to run so that the needle took about two minutes to traverse the cylinder, an inscription covering nearly the whole of it was taken of a single note of the Harmonical, alternated with various others and held at each recurrence during several seconds. In the reproduction this repeated note was tuned by a careful adjustment of the screw so that it fell between those notes of the Harmonical which are 22 cents apart, and, as far as could be judged, was as much above one as below the other. In the majority of several trials on different days, it preserved this intermediate position at each recurrence not only to the end of the cylinder, but to the end of several successive reproductions of the melody. At no time did it move in the course of one reproduction far enough from this intermediate position to be identified in pitch with either of the neighboring Harmonical notes: although on two occasions it seemed to run through this interval of about the eighteenth of a tone in the course of three continuous repetitions of the reproduction. The result of this test indicates that under favorable conditions the phonograph run by electric power at a medium rate can reproduce a sequence of pitch which covers the cylinder, correctly to within an almost imperceptible fraction of a tone.

The songs of our collection have been written down a few notes at a time by ear, with an occasional reference to one of Messrs. Mason and Hamlin's