Sound

“ The puzzling question of ‘what am I?’ still persists, and I am farther away from the right answer than ever. Would a sound be a sound if there were no one to hear it? If the waves of vibration struck no human ear, would the sound be in existence at all? ”

“ A sound in a low key, brings down the mind. Such a sound in a full tone, hath a certain solemnity, which it communicates to the emotion produced by it. A sound in a high key, chears the mind by raising it. ”

“ Yet in those lucid globes no ray
By any chance shall break astray.
Hark how the rolling surge of sound,
Arches and spirals circling round,
Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear
With music it is heaven to hear. ”

“ The sound rises, rises like the skylark, and the ear rises with it. And then comes a moment when the sound still rises and the hearing stops, like those birds that do not frequent the loftiest altitudes. ”

“ So we see that all the sounds we hear, - the warning noises which keep us from harm, the beautiful musical notes with all the tunes and harmonies that delight us, even the power of hearing the voices of those we love, and learning from one another that which each can tell, - all these depend upon the invisible waves of air, even as the pleasures of light depend on the waves of ether. It is by these sound-waves that nature speaks to us, and in all her movements there is a reason why her boice is sharp or tender, loud or gentle, awful or loving. ”

“ Firstly, a sound and every voice is heard, When, getting into ears, they strike the sense With their own body. For confess we must Even voice and sound to be corporeal, Because they're able on the sense to strike. Besides voice often scrapes against the throat, And screams in going out do make more rough The wind-pipe—naturally enough, methinks, When, through the narrow exit rising up In larger throng, these primal germs of voice Have thus begun to issue forth. ”

“ But whence the ear that orders the length of the strings
To a magic of numbers flying before your thought
Through a door that closes against your breathless wonder?
Is there no Ear round the ear of a man, that it senses
Through strings and columns of air the soul of sound?
I thrill as I call it a tuning fork that catches
The waves of mingled music and light from afar,
The antennæ of Thought that listens through utmost space.
Surely the concord that ruled my spirit is proof
Of an Ear that tuned me, able to tune me over
And use me again if I am worthy to use. ”

“ My darling Flora’s Margaret.
{78}
THE RICH, SWEET SOUND OF THE HUMAN VOICE.
Many sounds are heard by the human ear,
Sounds that are delicate, or loud and clear,
The rustling of leaves by the gentle breeze,
Or the hurricane crashing thru the trees;
Sounds in the mountains and sounds on the sea
And sounds wherever man happens to be;
But of all known sounds the sound of man’s choice
Is the rich, sweet sound of the human voice. ”

“ Nature always possesses a certain sonorousness, as in the hum of insects, the booming of ice, the crowing of cocks in the morning, and the barking of dogs in the night, which indicates her sound state. God's voice is but a clear bell sound. I drink in a wonderful health, a cordial, in sound. The effect of the slightest tinkling in the horizon measures my own soundness. ”

“ All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their pre-ordained energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; and when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become as it were one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion. ”

“ Nothing but feeling and sentiment could produce them. It was soul breathed forth in sound. I was always alive to the influence of music; indeed, I was susceptible of voluptuous influences of every kind—sounds, colors, shapes, and fragrant odors. ”

“ Only think what a rapid succession of waves must quiver through the air as a tiny lark agitates his little throat and pours forth a volume of song! The next time you are in the country in the spring, spend half an hour listening to him, and try and picture to yourself how that little being is moving all the atmosphere round him. Then dream for a little while about sound, what it is, how marvellously it works outside in the world, and inside in your ear and brain ”

“ Beyond doubt the world is full of sounds that we cannot hear and of sights that we never see, for of the whole range of vibration our senses permit us to garner but the veriest fragment—a few notes here of sound, and a brief range there of sight, out of the whole vast scale of vibrant Nature. ”

“ Thus, any continued sound, as the music of birds, or a fall of waters, awakens every moment the mind of the beholder, and makes him more attentive to the several beauties of the place, that lie before him. ”

“ Then we were quickly conscious of the noise, mostly of human voices, speaking or shouting strange speech in every direction, which the wooden open-plank house caught up much as a violin does its sound, and multiplied without transferring them into music. ”

“ You never see the source of the sound, and are utterly unable to localise his note, which seems to come from everywhere at once, to be some hundred-throated voice of the air. Sometimes you fancy you just catch him, a mere vague spot against the blue, an intenser throb in the universal pulsation of light. ”

“ When the air is set in motion by the vibration of certain bodies of wood, metal and other material, we know that sound waves, striking upon the tympanum of the ear, penetrate to the brain and imagination. ”

“ The slightest sound becomes a crash, and we hear the fall of waters, the roar of cataracts, the blare of trumpets, or brilliant harmonies. I have seen persons, naturally almost insensible to music, lifted by a few musical notes into an ecstasy such as we read of in the lives of saints. ”

“ The objects of both sight and hearing—the sound which strikes the ear and the appearance which meets the eye, the articulations of the voice and the outlines of the members, every audible and visible motion—are both alike produced from matter contiguous to us ”

“ O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! ”

“ First a sound represents something in the outer world, and afterwards something in the inner, and this sound at last is represented by a mark, and this mark stands for a picture, and every brain is a gallery, and the artists—that is to say, the souls—exchange pictures and statues. ”

“ That was the first sound in the song of love! Scarce more than silence is, and yet a sound. Hands of invisible spirits touch the strings Of that mysterious instrument, the soul, And play the prelude of our fate. We hear The voice prophetic, and are not alone. ”

“ Sound arises from a vibratory or tremulous motion produced by a stroke on a sounding body, which motion that body communicates to the surrounding medium, which carries the impression forwards to the ear, and there produces its sensation. In other words, sound is the sensation arising from the impression made by a sonorous body upon the air or some other medium, and carried along by either fluid to the ear. ”

“ Rising and leaping,
Sinking and creeping,
Swelling and sweeping,
Showering and springing,
Flying and flinging,
Writhing and ringing,
Eddying and whisking,
Spouting and frisking,
Turning and twisting,
Around and around
With endless rebound:
Smiting and fighting,
A sight to delight in;
Confounding, astounding,
Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound. ”

“ Seated one day at the Organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.
I do not know what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then;
But I struck one chord of music,
Like the sound of a great Amen. ”

“ ' A chorus of elfin voices blowing about me Weaves to a babel of sound. Each cries a secret. I run among them, reach out vain hands, and drown. ”

“ We have assigned the first division of natural beauty to sound, which we distinguish from diction in that propriety and force of meaning are looked to in this; in sound it is the pleasantness or harshness that is regarded, flattering or offending the ear, or it is a kind of imitation of the subject-matter—sad things recited tearfully, excited rapidly, or harsh harshly. ”

“ The inarticulate sound of the voice is the scream of pain or the shout of joy, mutually intelligible to all human hearts; and this aerial basis of language continues to be more or less intelligible to all souls, when modulated as in poetry into melody and rhythm by emotion and character. ”

“ Like the harmony of sounds in musical composition, it produces an effect of which we are unable to give an account; but which we feel to be instantly destroyed by the jarring sound of a different note, or the discordant effect of a foreign expression. ”

“ Sound is sense generated by the action of the medium, when its motion reacheth the ear and the rest of the organs of sense. Now, the motion of the medium is not the sound itself, but the cause of it. For the phantasm which is made in us, that is to say, the reaction of the organ, is properly that which we call sound. ”

“ Our minds can be sounding-boards, which gather and reflect upon our souls the tone pictures we hear. A wooden surface must be smooth, properly formed, and perfectly poised, or it will not collect, focus, and reflect sound [204] effects. ”

“ The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before any words came through. ”

“ This writer endeavors to establish his views on this subject, by observing, that “grandeur or sublimity of sound, can no otherwise arise from its loudness, than as that loudness excites an idea of power in the sonorous object, or in some other associated with it in the mind: for a child’s drum, close to the ear, fills it with more real noise, than the discharge of a cannon a mile off ”

“ The human speaking voice is full of changes; unlike the notes from a musical instrument, there is no uniformity in it; the rise and fall of inflection, the varying sound of the vowels and consonants, the combinations of words and syllables—each produces a different vibration and different tone. ”

“ How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, Like softest music to attending ears! ”

“ Still, the persuasion that sound is some motion of the air, continued to keep hold of men’s minds, and acquired additional distinctness. The illustration employed by Vitruvius, in the following passage, is even now one of the best we can offer.3 “Voice is breath, flowing, and made sensible to the hearing by striking the air. ”

“ If you can once realize the fact that sound is a series of quick, sharp puffs of air, or to use a more scientific term, vibrations of air, it will be easy for you to understand most of the laws of sound. ”

“ As a sound method it wholly preserves the characteristic peculiarities of all sound method,—it starts from the impressions of hearing, at once establishing the regular relation to language, and only later adds to them the impressions of sight, thus clearly distinguishing sound, matter, and the letter, its representation. ”

“ Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild—and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country. ”

“ When a word is pronounced in my hearing I hear the sound as a sound, perceive the person in the other room represented vicariously by the voice, and at the same time hear the word as a word and as a symbol of meaning. In general, the description of a sensation is best accomplished in terms of perception. ”

“ Sound is light, perceived under another form; each acts through vibrations to which man is sensitive and which he transforms, in the nervous centres, into ideas.
“Music, like painting, makes use of materials which have the property of liberating this or that property from the surrounding medium and so suggesting an image. ”

“ And again, all hearing receives voice or sound, and therefore all hearing is of one nature; but each one hears more rapidly or more slowly, according as the quality of his hearing is clear and sound. Let us pass now from these sensuous illustrations to the consideration of intellectual things. ”

“ Yes, the sound of water, the voice of the wind—completely foreign to human passions. All the other sounds of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of a soul. ”

“ What has been said about sound applies of course equally to light. The general principle is that the appearances, in different perspectives, which are to be grouped together as constituting what a certain thing is at a certain moment, are not to be all regarded as being at that moment. ”

“ Characteristics of sound.The sensation of sound is produced by rapid fluctuations in the pressure of the atmosphere on the tympanum of the ear. If the fluctuations are irregular and non-periodic, the sound is called a noise; if they are cyclic and follow a regular and sufficiently rapid periodic law, the sound is musical. ”

“ In a sadly-pleasing strain Let the warbling lute complain: Let the loud trumpet sound, Till the roofs all around The shrill echoes rebound: While in more lengthen'd notes and slow, The deep, majestic, solemn organs blow. ”

“ Wonder not at the strange Effects of musical Sounds, when other Sounds strangely affect the Mind. How are the Passions excited by the Sound of a Drum and the Discharge of Canons.... Not only human Minds and Bodies are affected by the Impression of Sounds, but even Things without Life. ”