326 Dr. Felix Semon [March 13, 



" no ear for music." Now this may mean a great many different 

 things. Some people have no ear for pitch, others not for melody. 

 The former will not hear even the most abominable flat or sharp 

 singing, the latter will never recognise even the most catching 

 melodies however often they may have heard them. Upon the 

 tympana of other ones music makes a directly painful im2)ression. 

 A third class has absolutely no sense of rhythm and cannot distin- 

 guish a march from a waltz ; again, others, and here we come to the 

 subject now under consideration, though having a keen enough 

 perception of music, and boing ready enough to detect faults in others, 

 are utterly unaware eitlier of the quality or of the pitch of their own 

 voices. No doubt many of those present to-night will remember 

 instances within their own experience in which some professional 

 singer or amateur has judged very harshly certain defects in another 

 singer's voice, being apparently utterly unaware that he himself had 

 the faults against which he vociferated, in a much higher degree than 

 the object of his attack. In other cases singers who will most acutely 

 hear any fiat singing in another are utterly incapable of a2)prehending 

 that tbey themselves sing flat, and finally, there is one class, who, 

 though they themselves are aware of their own singing flat, are 

 quite incapable of correcting the fault and of singing in pitch and 

 in unison with other voices or with accompanying instruments. 

 Instances of these j)oints will bo familiar to my hear -rs. 



The causes of all these deficiencies, which are of tlje most serious 

 importance for the career of any professional singer, are no doubt to 

 be found in the highest cerebral centres ; the imperfection of jjer- 

 ception being due either to those afi'erent fibres which carry the 

 impression of sound to the auditory centre or to congenital defect of 

 the centre itself, whilst the impossibility of singing in pitch, though 

 the singer himself is painfully conscious of his not doing so, must be 

 due to some mischief within the paths which lead from the auditory 

 to the phonatory centre. Defects of this sort are in part to some 

 extent remediable through the aid of long continued training. In 

 such cases it must be assumed that certain nerve cells originally not 

 intended or only intended in a minor degree for the conveyance of 

 the imi)ressious now under discussion, have been educated up to 

 higher functions, in the same way in which we see that after the 

 destruction of the speech centre in the left hemisjihere, the corre- 

 sponding part in the right hemisphere may be, though almost always 

 in an imperfect way, educated up to take the original duties of its 

 fellow in the left hemisphere. In the great majority (f cases, however, 

 either all training remains without efi'.ct, or the results are so small 

 in proportion to the labour spent that the game is hardly w'orth the 

 candle. This is a point of the very highest imjiortance. 



I have already previously mentioned that the training of the 

 voice cannot be compared to the training of the hand for the purposes 

 of piano or violin playing, inasmuch as the training of the latter is 

 mostly performed in the shape of conscious voluntary acts ; whilst 



