520 Transactions. 



in the extreme. Yet the Maori thoroughly appreciates his own music, 

 and appreciates in addition the music of the European, singing it, as well 

 as his' own, with facility, fidelity, and undoubted art. Birds, too, are able 

 to learn human tunes ; and the powers of natural mocking-birds are too 

 well known to need remark. Do not such powers prove the receptivity of 

 birds to be akin to that of man, and their discrimination to be as keen as 

 his — -for do not human beings, too, first learn by imitation ? 



In Maori music, it is not the apparently small compass of the song that 

 makes it distasteful to many ears, but the free use of quarter-tones.* Then 

 why is not the song of birds with small compass distasteful ? Again, if 

 failure to adhere to the recognized pitch of notes and recognized intervals 

 cause a song to be out of tune, why do not the songs of birds sound out 

 of tune ? The very fact that they are tuneful and pleasing to practically 

 every human ear is surely fact sufficient to give one pause before stating 

 that their notes do not conform to the scale accepted by musicians. Did 

 they not conform, their sound would be found intolerable, simply because 

 they would be different from the standard to which we are accustomed. 

 They are, of course, full of slurs, trills, vocalizations, changes of timbre, 

 to an extent quite beyond the human voice or any single musical instru- 

 ment ; but the basis on which they are built is none other than that on 

 which the music of the human voice and of musical instruments is built, 

 and the one notation serves for recording them all. 



The scale in music is usually held to be an artificial subdivision of a 

 range of sound lying between two notes, one of which is composed of twice 

 the number of vibrations per second that composes the other. This range 

 is called an octave, and it comprises seven different notes, rising in pitch 

 in a definite series from the lowest to the highest. The eighth note has a 

 difference in pitch from the lowest, and a certain difference in sound ; 

 though if the two are sounded together a single appreciable sound results : 

 their vibrations coincide, and, in addition to the coinciding vibrations, the 

 higher note has an additional vibration midway between each coinciding 

 pair ; so that whilst one sound results when both notes are sounded 

 together, the ear is easily able to detect its composite quality. 



When, then, two notes, one an octave higher than the other, are sounded 

 together, the singleness of the sound is apparent only. It is quite evident 

 that there must be two sounds in the resultant note, and the ear is easily 

 able to detect both. Furthermore, if the lower note be sounded alone, the 

 ear is still able to detect the upper, though with much greater difficulty 

 than when both are sounded together. Nor is this imagination only. The 

 motion of every resonant vibrating body is more or less complex. It 

 vibrates as a whole ; and this, the principal vibration, gives the principal 

 and predominant note. At the same time, it vibrates in two equal parts, 

 each part vibrating with twice the frequency of the whole, and producing 

 accordingly a note an octave higher, but very much fainter, than the prin- 

 cipal note. Nor is this all. The wire or string, supposing it to be a piano 

 or violoncello in question, is subdivided into quite a number of portions, all 

 vibrating with different frequencies from the whole string, and so producing 

 different sounds. All are normally, however, vibrating in definite and com- 

 paratively fixed proportions. The string is, as it were, divided first into 

 two portions ; then into three, four, five, six, and so on. Where the 

 division is into two the vibrating parts give a sound an octave above the 



* Sir G. Grey, Polynesian Mythology, 1885. xlppendix, pp. 225 et seq. 



