Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/112

102 result of training, managed in a more artistically effective manner than in ordinary speech.

Speech differs from song as walking does from dancing; speech may be called the prose, song the poetry of vocal sound. Mr. Herbert Spencer has defined song as "emotional speech," but this term might with greater justice be used to designate the hystero-epileptic oratory which threatens to become acclimatized in this sober island, or even to the exchange of amenities between two angry cabmen. It would be more accurate to call song "musical speech," using the word "musical" in its strict sense as signifying sound with definite variations of tone and regularity of time. But, just as there may be "songs without words," so there may be speech without voice, as in whispering. Sound, as we have already seen, is produced in the larynx, but articulation, or the transformation of meaningless sound into speech, is performed in the mouth; in speaking, therefore, the two parts work together, the larynx sending out a stream of sound, and the mouth, by means of the tongue, cheeks, palate, teeth, and lips, breaking it up into variously formed jets of words. In other words, the larynx supplies the raw material of sound which the mouth manufactures into speech. Time, which is an essential element of song, is altogether disregarded in speech, while the intervals of tone are so irregular as to defy notation, and are filled up with a number of intermediate sounds instead of being sharply defined. The voice glides about at its own sweet will in speaking, obeying no rule whatever, while in song it springs or drops from one tone to the next over strictly measured gaps. In singing, short syllables are lengthened out and cease in fact to be short, and (except in certain kinds of dramatic singing and in recitative) the accent naturally falls on the vowels and not on the consonants. In speaking, only the lower third of the voice is employed as a rule, while in singing the greatest effect is generally produced, except in the case of contraltos and basses, by the use of the upper and middle notes. In speech the range of tone, even in the most excitable persons, hardly ever exceeds half an octave; in singing the average compass is two octaves. Singing tends to preserve purity of language, the rules which govern the utterance of every note also affecting the articulate element combined with it, and keeping the words cast in fixed forms a stereotype of sound, if I may venture the metaphor. Speech, on the other hand, like handwriting, is always changing. As Max Müller says: "A struggle for life is constantly going on among the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue." Thus speech not only tends to split language into