Smith Sound

“ Beyond and below the cliffs lay Smith’s Sound, an unbroken expanse of blue, limited westward by snow-clad Ellesmere Land between Capes Isabella and distant Sabine. The strait was, so far, quite open and unencumbered by ice, but away to the northward, where Hayes’ Sound interrupted the outline of the coast, a long thin line of pack, the first indication of coming troubles, streaked the horizon. This was bad news to have to report on our return to the ship, but there was no help for it. We turned our backs on it, and struck out inland across the muddy flats in the direction of Foulke Fiord. ”

“ In the background was the muted sibilant of the reaction motor, a sound like the shush of a distant seashore. Farradyne heard these sounds unconsciously. They were as pleasant to the ears of the spaceman as the sounds of a sailing ship were to the old-time seaman.
But another faint sound came to disturb him, rising up into the level of audibility very slowly.
It was a ringing in Farradyne's ears.
Ringing in the ears can come from too much alcohol, or a shot of dope, or a slap on the side of the head. Or a change in air-pressure. ”

“ Smith’s Sound expands into a capacious bay: it has been surveyed throughout its entire extent. From its northern and eastern corner, in lat. 80° 10′, long. 66°, a channel has been discovered and followed until further progress was checked by water free from ice. This channel trended nearly due north, and expanded into an apparently open sea, which abounded with birds and bears and marine life.
“The death of the dogs during the winter threw the travel essential to the above discoveries upon the personal efforts of the officers and men. The summer finds them much broken in health and strength. ”

“ To my knowledge Smith never had visitors. For a moment I hesitated outside the door with one foot on the stairs. All my interest in this strange man revived, and my curiosity rose to a point not far from action. At last I might learn something of the habits of this lover of the night and the darkness.
"The sound of voices was plainly audible, Smith's predominating so much that I never could catch more than points of sound from the other, penetrating now and then the steady stream of his voice. ”

“ Only Smith Sound promised to lead north of the 80th parallel. This had been discovered as early as 1616 by Baffin, whose farthest north was only exceeded by forty miles, in 1852, by Inglefield in the Isabel, one of the ships despatched in search of Franklin. He was followed up by Kane in the Advance, fitted out in 1853 by the munificence of two American citizens, Grinnell and Peabody. Kane worked his way right through Smith Sound and Robeson Channel into the sea named after him. For two years he continued investigating Grinnell Land and the adjacent shores of Greenland. ”

“ He sat at the window and looked out into the black shadows under the cedars. Smith ceased his pacing and stood again on the rug very still. He was listening! I doubt not we were all listening.
Some faint sound broke the impressive stillness, coming from the direction of the village street. It was a vague, indefinite disturbance, brief, and upon it ensued a silence more marked than ever. Some minutes before, Smith had extinguished the lamp. In the darkness I heard his teeth snap sharply together.
The call of an owl sounded very clearly three times. ”

“ And, Smith, too! It was all up with our precious secret parleys; perhaps we should not even be allowed to see one another any more. In my misery I sat down on the floor in a corner of my dungeon and felt as if I would not much care if the house were to fall about my ears and bury me in the ruins. Cheerful reflection this for a youth of my tender years!
As I sat, shivering and brooding over my hard fate, I heard footsteps ascending the stairs. When you are sitting alone in an empty room, at the dead of night, this is never a very fascinating sound, and I did not much enjoy it. ”

“ His ears, attuned to life aboard a spacer, had caught the sound of someone coming up the landing ramp and into the salon a few decks above. Then faint as if it were a hundred yards away but audible in the silence of the ship, they could hear the triple-tongued piping of a man.
He was answered by Carolyn Niles. "Speak Terran!"
Farradyne nudged Norma. "That's the line I used and it worked," he chuckled.
Carolyn's companion said, "Why use this mono-voice junk?"
"You know the rules. It's not smart to relax, you idiot." ”

“ There seems too to be some natural connection between acuteness in tune and quickness in time or succession, as well as between gravity and slowness: an acute sound seems to fly off more quickly than a grave one: the treble is more cheerful than the bass; its notes likewise commonly succeed one another more rapidly. But instrumental Music, by a proper arrangement, by a quicker or slower succession of acute and grave, of resembling and contrasted sounds, can not only accommodate itself to the gay, the sedate, or the melancholy mood ”

“ The reeds only sound by suction: you draw the breath through, and that sets the reed vibrating and sounding,215 whilst the note on an instrument is being tuned. To blow through on to the reeds would horrify the native musician, because the moisture of the breath would lodge and injure the durability of the reed. To have a set of pipes as these, is as it would be to us if we had a dozen tuning forks in a case to tune our pianos by for ourselves. All the stringed instruments in Japan require to be properly tuned every time they are played ”

“ For our practical interest in recognising whom we have to deal with outweighs our interest in the shades of sound per se. The selection again of certain attitudes, expressions, &c., in Smith, to stand as characteristic of him so that when others are present we say, "He does not look like himself," and if he is sitting to us for his portrait we spend an hour perhaps in placing him and lighting him so as to bring out with the utmost clearness these selected traits-this selection, I say, is equally explicable by various æsthetic standards, permanency simplicity, harmony, clearness, and the like. ”

“ This is the pipe giving the note corresponding in pitch to the imperial standard pipe, yet it is one fourth less than that in length, because, though both are cylindrical, the one is whistle or flute blown and the other reed blown—such is the law of these reed pipes—whilst the real standard length standing beside it, No. 15, gives a sound a fourth lower, and is the lowest in sound in the scale.
Yet b♭ is not the tonic; the Chinese have not in their music our kind of reckoning; but their e♭, at the junction of the two tetrachords, corresponds to the mese or middle note of the Greek scale. ”

“ In India we find flutes which seem to show a compromise or blending of the tip-blown and side-blown methods. In the India Museum some pipes may be seen with a curiously shaped hollow tip, cut with a slant curve, across which the player blows. These several ways are but different illustrations of one and the same principle—that is to say—the stream of air blown across the hole creates suction in the pipe, which reaching its limit is constantly broken with a rapidity of action resulting in periodic vibration of definite sound or pitch. ”

“ The reed tongues are very thin, and are not lifted from the level of the plates; consequently they may be caused to sound both by drawing with the breath and by blowing, although the latter is prohibited in practice, as the moisture from blowing condensing on the reed alters the pitch, and corrodes the metal. Any excessive forcing of the tone the reeds are not liable to, because the air is passing at the same time through all the pipes, those that are sounding and those that are not. ”

“ The dream of the sudden flash in the night, the rising mushroom cloud and then annihilation. You are living the nightmare again but this time it's true, you know it's true. You can't be dreaming. The bombs are actually falling and huge fireballs are sweeping upward while seas of flame spread at supersonic speeds to engulf the city. You feel the blast, the searing heat, you feel your flesh melting away. You try to scream but the sound dies in your throat as your lungs shrivel. Horror makes you try again and somehow you do scream and wake yourself up. ”

“ Not a breath out of any o' yez remimber, till I get there. The drum's unhandy and we got to go slow wid it," and he slipped the strap over his head and started upstairs, followed by the band.
The ascent was made without a sound until old Mr. Lang's door was reached, when McFudd's foot slipped, and, but for the bassoonist's head, both the Irishman and the drum would have rolled down-stairs. Lang heard the sound, and recognizing the character of the attendant imprecation, did not get up. "It's only McFudd," he said quietly to his suddenly awakened wife. ”

“ If, on the other hand, this is a completely individualistic, or anarchic culture, we must call Brade for help. We would need a horde of space fighters to control the entire group." He looked at Linus Brein. "You will, of course, have their language analyzed?"
"We are working on it now. It is not difficult to connect the sound forms with the meaning, under known conditions and situations. But it is extremely difficult to make such analysis when we have not the foggiest notion of what situation is being described by the sounds. I—" ”

“ For many thousand years beyond this the imagination must travel to reach the earliest sources of music. The complete set of seven pipes claimed by Pan was not the work of a summer’s day, the scale as seven sounds was not the witchery of a nymph’s voice happily remembered by a forest God; no, we may be sure the course of life was more prosaic than that, and the seven-toned instrument had, as a seven branched river, its beginning from one,—one pipe, ages, it may be, earlier than the seven.
What do I make of it? Clearly this,—man IS a measuring animal. ”

“ As the music filled the room, Richard settled himself on one of the large divans between Nathan and Oliver, his head lying back on the cushions, his eyes half closed. If the table with its circle of thoughtful and merry faces, had set his brain to work, the tones of Simmons's violin had now stirred his very soul. Music was the one thing in the world he could not resist. ”

“ A strong man could stand against the now highly variable wind; could move around without being blown beyond the horizon; and during those few minutes all six men gathered leaves. That time, however, was very short. The wind steadied into the reverse direction with ever-increasing fury; winch and space-line again came into play. And in a scant half hour, when the line began to hum an almost musical note under its load, Samms decided to call it quits. ”

“ In the centre stood his dancing master, with his hat, boots and gloves on. In an advanced station stood an old soldier in Scotch uniform, acting as sentinel, while Smith himself stood before them, his feet under the curtain, playing a tune on the fiddle, to which they would all dance or beat in perfect harmony with the music—the one half on the right to one part of the tune, and the other half on the left to the other part, and then all together as regular and as natural as life. ”

“ As an example of international courtesy worthy of imitation, I refer with pleasure to the fact that, when informed by Major Elliott, of the United States Army, that our experiments had begun, the Light-house Board at Washington, of their own spontaneous kindness, forwarded to us for trial a very noble instrument of this description, which was immediately mounted at the South Foreland.
The principle of the siren is easily understood. A musical sound is produced when the tympanic membrane is struck periodically with sufficient rapidity. ”

“ Long before poor old Warner had clambered out of his cab, the thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew and light on this lawn. Once or twice more, by the mercy of God, we may feel the thing, but the man we shall never see. In a spring garden before breakfast we shall smell the smell called Smith. In the snapping of brisk twigs in tiny fires we shall hear a noise named Smith. ”

“ If I spoil them the loss won't amount to anything, and if I succeed—well, maybe I can help out Uncle Sam a bit more."
As Tom had said he would do, he began at the very foundation, and studied the fundamental principles of sound.
"Sound," the young inventor told Ned Newton, in speaking about the problem, "is a sensation which is peculiar to the ear, though the vibrations caused by sound waves may be felt in many parts of the body. But the ear is the great receiver of sound."
"You aren't going to invent a sort of muffler for the ears, are you, Tom?" asked Ned. ”

“ Smith says I have been working too hard and I am blue because I am tired. Anyway I want to get way down in a big easy chair and watch the fire and hear the wind in the trees and once in a while, hear the acorns as they drop on the roof. That is all the music I want. I never want to hear an orchestra, and I am sure that some day I will put my foot through the big drum that keeps time for the dancing. I wish you liked the country, Kate, and we could get a little place and have a pig and some chickens and a duck and I wouldn't never have to see a pavement or a street light. ”

“ While all this rearranging of the banquet-hall was going on, Simmons was busying himself putting a new bridge under the strings of his violin, tightening its bow, and testing the condition of his instrument by that see-saw, harum-scarum flourish so common to all virtuosos;—no function of the club was ever complete without music—the men meanwhile settled themselves comfortably in their seats ”