Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 14.djvu/199

* MUSIC. 163 Mtrsic. sculptor. Mersenne's law is that the loudness of sound varies inversely as the square of the distance of the sonorous body from the ear. So the range of audition is over eleven octaves, but this is for an exceptional ear. Musical sounds ditl'er from each other in loudness, in pitcli, in quality. Biot says "all sonorous bodies yield simultaneously an infinite nuinoer of sounds of graduall3' increasing in- tensity." This phenonicnon is similar to that which obtains for the harmonics of strings, but the law for the scries of harmonics is dill'erent for bodies of various forms, ilay it not be this dilference which produces the particular char- acter of sound, called timbre {Klaiiyfiirhr, clang- tint), which distinguishes each form of b(xly, and causes tile sound of a string and that of a vase to produce in us diti'erent sensations? Jlay it not be owing to the diminution of the intensity in harmonics of each series that we find agree- able certain concords that would be intolerable if produced by sounds equally loud? And maj' not the quality of each particular substance — of wood or metal, for instance — be due to the su- perior intensity of one or another harmonic? We have now some dim idea of the luitiiral laws which give us force or loudness, pitch, and quality in music. The whole sidiject in all its fascinating range and variety is admirably treated in Zahm's Sound and Music. Therein may be learned much about the production and transmission of sound, its velocity, reflection, refraction, resonance, and interference. Of pitch it may be only said here that its standard in music is the A string of the violin, which gives the tvniing note for orchestras. It corresponds to A, above middle C of the piano- forte. A3 as a vibration number of 435 was chosen in 1859 as a standard pitch. This is called the French pitch and its exact vibrations are really 435.45. It is the S'tandard pitch of our orchestras, and since 1802 for all pianofortes. (See Pitch.) All the modifications of sound made by the ingenuity of man in his inventions of string, wood, lirass, pipe — as in the organ — and percus- sion instrinnents, from the drum to the piano, give us variety in tonal timbre and are based on the human voice, which with its bass, tenor, alto, and soprano served as a model for the viol family. Hclmholtz has considered the analogies of light and sound, both being modes of vibratory motion. In his psychological 0])ties, he gives the follow- ing analogies between the notes of the piano and the colors of the spectrum : F,J End ot the red g. U'mI A. Rpil A.J OrariffP-red B, Oranti-e ('. Tel low t'.t fJreen d. ftrepniRh bine (l.J Cyanogen blue X'pon this laboratory experiment some imagina- tive theorists have endeavored to rear a system of musical a>sthetics, but unsuccessfully, though we have come to speak naturally of color in music. Tone and color, while related, as are all things nuuidane, are far asunder in terms of art. As the receptive organ of tone and its transmitter to the brain, the ear plays as im- portant a part as tone itself. Without it there would be no music, paradoxical as it may sound. E, Iniligo blue t, Violet t,| Violet p:, ntra-violet g,J( ntra-violet a. Ultra-violet a,J T'ltra-violet b, End of tjie solar spec- trum. for it is the eye that perceives, the ear that hears, the hand that feels, which give us our picture of the world. Under this h3pothesis the world then is idea, idealists and materialists meeting amicably on the little strip of territory called .sensation. The complete apparatus (jf the ear, the wonderful iute of three thousand strings,' called the cortical fibres after their dis- coverer Corti, should be carefully investigated by the student. We may now truthfully affirm, after brieHy studying the production of sound and its modifications by instruments, that music is a mode of motion. But music as a pleasure-evoking emotion! Whence comes it, what is its psjxdiologic basis? It is purely human, for not the most fanciful of poets or extravagant of psychologists can tor- ture into formal lieauty the .songs of birds, the growling of the tempest, the sound of the sea. All these things and many more may furnish the starting point, the spring-board of the composer's imaginings, but artistic they are not. There is no real music in nature. As a play impulse, art has Ijeen considered and discussed by many mod- ern writers. Schopenhauer, whose intuitions are often superior to other men's logic, calls art "a momentary liberation," and Herbert Spencer de- velops his idea, linking it with biological condi- tions. In his Principles of Psychohjyy he says that a characteristic of nerve processes is that the superfluous integration of ganglion cells should be accompanied by an inherited readiness to discharge. Thus the "aimless activity' we call play is the result of a force expended, a force that man as a highly developed animal has more of than is needed for the struggle of existence. In many animals he finds imitation a factor, but Karl Groos in his PUnj of Man believes in impulse and intuition — "the inherited impulse toward prescribed reactions in certain brain-tracts seems to be in itself a sufficient cause for play without the necessarj' accompaniment of superfluous energy." Schiller calls play a harmless expendi- ture of exuberant strength Ahich is its own ex- cuse for action. Lazarus is the exponent of the reaction theory. When we are tired of natural or physical labor we play, thus recreating our- selves. Professor Groos, however, finds in both the surplus expenditure and the recreation theories only partial statements of the truth. For him, play is the im]iulse toward repetition, and this is a physiological reason for playing to the exhaustion point, which we notice so often, even if we are tired at the beginning. "Let us recall first," he writes, "the tremendous sigjiifi- cance of involuntary rejjetition to all animal life, for just as the simplest organisms in alt<'rnate expansion and contraction and the higher ones in heart-beats and breathing are pervaded by waves of movements, so also in the sphere of voluntary activity there is a well- nigh irresistible tendency to repletion." Play, too, furnishes distraction from quotidian cares. It is an educational factor of prime importance, elaborating immatviro capacities and influencing the evolution of hereditary qualities, Schiller declares that man alternates between weak and sensuous pleasures, and his dictum that man is fully human only when he plays has, as Professor Groos declares, "definite biological meaning." Conrad Lange defines art "as the capacity pos- .sessed by men of furnishing themselves and others with pleasure based on conscious self-illusion.