Sounding line

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Louder than your step in the woods is the sound of your voice. Perhaps there is no other noise so far-reaching, so alarming, so silencing in the woods as the human voice. When your tongue begins, all the other tongues cease. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sound was the first instinctive language, one for man and winds and waters; and music, which is the development of this primeval converse, leaving to grammars the expression of cold and abstract thought, has gathered about her in her mountain caverns the echoes of all sighs sad or passionate, of all inarticulate cries born of aspiration or desire, and there blended them into eternal harmonies which at her word flow forth and join the hearts of men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But all kinds of natural sounds, as winds, waters, and even the crying of a baby, if not too loud and protracted, are not noises to me. Is it right to feel the sound of human voices a great annoyance? ”

“ A tone is something to hear, and hearing is mental. An old French anatomist once said: “The eye sees what it is looking for, and it is looking only for what it has in mind.” The same is true of the ear. We hear the tone mentally before we sing it, and we should hear it as distinctly as if it were sung by another. ”

“ Brücke seems to use tone and sound as almost synonymous, but in metric we must distinguish between them. Sound (sonus) is the more general, tone (τόνος) the more specific expression. Sound, in this general sense, may have a stronger or weaker tone. ”

“ Every lover of poetry is aware of the large share which the mere sound of the words contributes to its beauty. This is true even when we abstract from rhythm, which we shall neglect for the time being, and think only of euphony, alliteration, assonance, and rime. There is a joy truly surprising in the mere repetition of vowels and consonants. For myself, I find a pleasure in the mere repetition of vowels and consonants all out of proportion to what, a priori, I should be led to expect from so slight a cause. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sound is to a poem what colour is to a picture. Get away from the printed word, the mere symbol; it means something for the head, it is true, but nothing for the heart until it is translated into sound. ”

“ Whatever makes a noise, from the deafening roar of sea, cataract, and whirlwind’s mighty crash, through all forms of animal life, to the sweet and gentle voice of woman, makes a sound which agrees perfectly with its character. ”

“ But it should be borne in mind that quantity has reference to loudness or volume of sound, and pitch to the elevation or depression of a tone. The difference may be distinguished by the slight and heavy strokes on a bell;—both of which produce sounds alike in pitch; but they differ in quantity or loudness, in proportion as the strokes are light or heavy.
RULES FOR QUANTITY.
1. SOFT, OR SUBDUED TONES, are those which range from a whisper to a complete vocality, and are used to express fear, caution, secrecy, solemnity, and all tender emotions. ”

“ Sometimes a sound is heard like the clang of an iron bar against a hard, hollow tree, or a piercing cry rends the air; these are not repeated, and the succeeding silence tends to heighten the unpleasant impression which they make on the mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ A slight change in any one of these adjustments gives us a new sound which is akin to the old one, because of the continuance of the other adjustments, but which is acoustically distinct from it, so sensitive has the human ear become to the nuanced play of the vocal mechanism. ”

“ The sound greets one’s ears all day and every day in the streets, and resembles that of a stick being drawn across palings; if you happen to be lying ill, the endless sound is apt to be as nerve racking as the notes of the brain-fever bird in India. ”

“ A feeling of vibration occurs when the medium, as water or air, is agitated in such manner as to produce sound. This feeling is especially produced in the self by speech; the origin of speech is the calling of the mate, which call is made by one and heard by the other, and hence heard by both. ”

“ "There comes to me out of the Past A voice, whose tones are sweet and wild, Singing a song almost divine, And with a tear in every line; ”

“ For strangely in this so solid-seeming World, which nevertheless is in continual restless flux, it is appointed that Sound, to appearance the most fleeting, should be the most continuing of all things. ”

“ To understand the inner working of the phonograph the reader must be acquainted with the theory of sound. All sound is the result of impulses transmitted by a moving body usually reaching the ear through the medium of the air. The quantity of the sound, or loudness, depends on the violence of the impulse ”

“ As to musical theory, emotional tone and vowel-tone are connected. In fact, an emotional tone may be defined as a vowel, whose particular musical quality is that produced by the human vocal organs, when adjusted to a particular state of feeling. ”

“ The other, the mouth, as an echo-cave or resonator, no less wonderful in its power of forming itself to resound the harmonics of the vocal tones. This gives the
voice its power of imitating any sound within its reach. We will analyze the voice. ”

“ It is probable, that previous to all experience, we should as little know, whether a sound came from the right or left, from above or below, from a great or a small distance, as we should know whether it was the sound of a drum, or a bell, or a cart. ”

“ It is long before children shew any sensibility to the beauty of sounds. To the greater 240 number of the sounds which we denominate beautiful, the common people, in the same manner, are altogether indifferent. To the peasant, the Curfew is only the mark of the hour of the evening,—the Sheep-bell, the sign of the neighbourhood of the flock,—the sound of a Cascade, the sign of the falling of water, &c. Give him the associations which men of cultivated imagination have with such sounds, and he will infallibly feel their beauty. ”

“ The vibrations of the voice, as you see now while I am speaking, cause that little flame on the needle to flicker, diminishing with the lowered degrees of a single tone and rising with its upward trend. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The multitude of sounds which it is possible for a human being to produce are the result of various degrees of stretching of the vocal chords, together with the movements of the mouth, lips and tongue. ”

“ The dulness of the poet's ear shows itself in the defective melody of his verse; for both metre and rhythm have a physiological basis; they represent and express the harmony which is in the body when the body is finely attuned to the spirit. ”

“ If the movements of the vocal organs are quick, flexible and without muscular tension or stiffness, 111 and if the mouth opens neither too much nor too little for each vowel-sound, words may be sung and understood while beauty of tone is not sacrificed. ”

“ How gratefully the sound falls upon ears that have been long unaccustomed to sounds and things connected with home, and so long accustomed to wild, savage sounds, that these have at length lost their novelty, and become everyday and commonplace, while the first have gradually grown strange and unwonted. ”

“ A perfectly used voice, on the other hand, convinces the hearer that the singer has full command of all the resources of the vocal organs. Each tone is a perfect musical sound, free from fault or blemish. The voice moves from one note to another with ease and with purity of intonation. ”

“ The art of articulation adds to the richness of meaning, it is the connection between sound and sense. Open sounds are in harmony with joy, and very distinct emotional effects are produced by arrangements of consonants. The effect created by the use of the vowels and consonants in The Spider and the Flea has already been referred to under "Setting." ”

“ The verbal expression does not progress; and yet the emotion increasing in force, as the mind dwells upon the thought, finds vent in increasing intensity of vocal expression. It may be well to note that by increasing the intensity is not necessarily meant greater loudness or higher pitch; but greater intensity of feeling, which may result in greater loudness or higher pitch, or, on the other hand, in deeper, more controlled, or more dignified expression. ”

“ You can really produce a tone in your face or in your throat. It is all produced by the vocal cords, and nowhere else, and merely receives its specific quality or character, so to speak, by, in part, the natural formation, and, in part, the conscious adjustment of the passages through which it passes on its way to the mouth. ”

“ The variations of tone, the modulations natural to the human voice, grow refined as the nervous organization becomes more delicate. Musical melody following the variations of human accents is capable of taking on as many shades as there are feelings in the heart. ”

“ For example, touch is meaningless without pause, and a pause is justified by change of pitch. Inflection and change of pitch constitute the elements of vocal form which reveal thought, and all combine with tone-color and movement, which reveal feeling and experience. Naturalness is the right union and combination of all the modulations. ”

“ Sounds differ from each other both with respect to their tone and intensity: in respect to their tone, they are distinguished into grave and acute: in respect to their intensity, they are distinguished into loud and low, or strong and weak. ”