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The Art of Improving the Voice and Ear; And of Increasing Their Musical Powers
The Art of Improving the Voice and Ear And of Increasing Their Musical Powers Author:James Rennie General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1825 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: II. MECHANISM OF THE VOICE. Such different views have been taken of the mechanism of the human voice, that it is by no means easy to reconcile them. Galen, the famous Greek physician, compared it to a flute, supposing it to be wholly of the nature of a wind instrument; and in modern times Dodart has advocated the same opinion. Ferrein and others, on the contrary, have compared it to a violin, the vocal chords being in this instance supposed to perform the office of strings. Kratzenstein thought it was like a drum with its head divided ; and Blumenbach compares it to an Eolian harp, -- a stringed instrument played upon by the wind. M. Magendie refers us to those instruments whose sound is produced by a reed, such as the hautboy, pipe, and clarionet. It will be necessary, however, for M. Magendie's comparison, ingenious as it is, to observe that the various tones of the voice are produced, not by stopping the holes at different distances, as in those reed instruments, but in varying the width of the windpipe at its orifice or outgoing, where the principal organs of the voice are situated, and also the length of the tube of the windpipe. M. Richerand puts the question, however, whether this be really so, and goes into a learned argument to prove that the voice is both a wind and a stringed instrument at the same time. It is very true, he says, that the voice becomes stronger, fuller, and passes from the acute to the grave, as the glottis enlarges with the progress of age ; that it remains always weaker and sharper in a woman, whose glottis is nearly a third smaller than a man's; but the tension or rela...« less