Apeil 28, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



595 



studio lies in the training of the ear and there- 

 fore, indirectly, the control of the voice or 

 instrument by the aid of the eye. On this 

 point we have conducted a number of series of 

 experiments to determine the effectiveness of 

 such training as evidenced, e. g., by the kind, 

 the rate, the degree, and the permanence of the 

 improvement gained by practising with the 

 instrument. The first of these series was 

 begun in 1903 ; from that time up to the pres- 

 ent, experiments in the training of pitch con- 

 trol have been in progress continuously for 

 purposes of developing methods and means and 

 testing results. Laying aside all technical 

 matters and detail, we may glean from these 

 experiments the following points of interest: 



Practically all singers — good, bad, or in- 

 different; trained or untrained; child or adult; 

 professional and non-professional — will im- 

 prove in pitch control by training with the in- 

 strument. He who can not sing a tone may 

 " find " himseK by the eye ; the average singer 

 is slovenly about pitch until shocked by what 

 he sees in the projected voice; the person who 

 can sing to a high degree of accuracy — say an 

 error of plus or minus one vibration — has 

 abundant room for improvement within a frac- 

 tion of a vibration, for the more accurately one 

 sings, the finer the instrument registers. 



The gain in training by aid of the eye may 

 be attributed in large part to the recognition 

 of certain subjective and objective sources of 

 error which may be eliminated after discovery 

 by the instriunent. The ear unchecked is lax 

 in its control of pitch. When the eye reveals 

 an error in pitch, it aids the ear in identifying 

 and making concrete the elements of hearing 

 which had before remained undifferentiated 

 and unrecognized. The seen tone serves both 

 as a whip and as a guide in pitch near the lower 

 limits of the ear, and is, therefore, the best in- 

 centive for improvement. Among the objec- 

 tive disturbances are the effect on pitch of the 

 loudness of the keynote heard, the loudness of 

 the note sung, the quality of the tone heard, 

 the quality and register of the tone sung, the 

 vowel of the syllable sung, the duration of the 

 tone, etc. Among the subjective factors the 

 most complicated one is the factor of effort of 



attention. Ordinarily one sings more accu- 

 rately when he tries; yet when one comes to 

 a certain stage he will sing better if not con- 

 scious of a specific effort to sing in pitch. 

 Fears, theories, anticipations and illusions also 

 modify the pitch. Under certain circum- 

 stances accuracy in pitch may be a mark of 

 the general condition of the system. 



Training with the eye improves the ability 

 to form concepts of intervals and sing them 

 with increasing accuracy. Who can sing, or 

 knows when he has sung, the chromatic scale 

 or even a single half tone? With the instru- 

 ment he can place the exact note in tempered 

 scale or in just intonation and study in detail 

 effect after effect and control for mastery with 

 the instrmnent which registers much finer dis- 

 tinctions than the ear can hear. Here again 

 we have found that there is room for improve- 

 ment for all. One man who thought he was 

 tone-deaf was trained to sing a tone interval 

 with a high degree of accuracy. One well- 

 known singer was struck with despair when she 

 saw how badly she sang the natural scale. 



Training the ear with the eye enhances its 

 ability in volimtary control of the voice as in 

 raising and lowering of the pitch. The im- 

 provement in this is astonishingly rapid; and 

 the reason for all this rapid improvement lies 

 in the fact that one sees the tone the moment 

 he sings and hears himself sing it, and can at 

 will identify the direction and exact amotmt 

 of the error. As has been pointed out, this 

 seeing of the tone serves as a whip and also 

 as a guide to specific effort. 



Striking a note may be fractionated, i. e., 

 separated into its parts so that one may study 

 from moment to moment, the attack, the re- 

 lease, and the sustaining (with its various pe- 

 riodic or progressive changes in pitch, both 

 desired and undesired). The instrument en- 

 ables the singer to take each of these in turn 

 and establish mastery under the criticism and 

 guidance of the eye. 



The gain made in singing with the aid 

 of the eye is transferred into auditory and 

 motor control. The improvement which takes 

 place in singing with the instrument is very 

 rapid and one would, therefore, suspect that 



