Tones have, first of all, the character that we call =pitch=; they lie, that is, up or down in the scale; they belong to the bass or the treble or to a middle region. The word ‘pitch’ means height; it is a term borrowed from perceptions of sight; and we cannot yet say certainly how it came to be applied to tones. Secondly, tones have the character of =volume=,—another borrowed word! The highest note on the piano seems shrunken, narrowed, pointed, as compared with the deepest note in the bass; and the difference comes out even more clearly with bottle tones. Thirdly, tones show a sort of recurrence. If you run your finger-nail quickly up the keyboard in a _glissando_, you perceive a change only of pitch and volume; but if you play the notes _c_, _d_, _e_ in one octave and then in another and then in a third, you realise that all the sequences are alike; we talk, indeed, of playing the _same_ notes in _different_ octaves. This recurring character of tones is called =tonality=. It has recently been stated that tones have a further character, that of =vocality=. Consider the series of vowels, U, O, A, E, I (voiced approximately as in the words _moot_, _moat_, _mart_, _mate_, _meet_); there is no doubt that U suggests a low bottle tone, and I a high whistle tone. Experiments seem to show that, as we go up the scale, the tones say M-M, U, O, A, E, I, S-S, F-F, CH (the sound in the Scotch _loch_); and, curiously enough, that they say these things at intervals of an octave; so that, when we have found a pure O, we find the pure A just an octave higher, and the tones that lie between give Oa, OA, oA, according to their position. The question is still in debate; for these experiments are opposed by others, and the whole subject of the nature of vowel-sounds is very thorny. It is quite clear that high and low tones sound definitely like U and I; but some of the other vowels are far less distinct; and the point of change from vowel to vowel does not appear to be as sharp and precise as the first experiments indicated. On the whole, _we shall do best to suspend judgement_.