Similar muscular sensations always accompany the expert performance of any action requiring a high degree of dexterity. Whatever be the form of exertion, skilful physical activity awakens muscular sensations of perfectly balanced and harmonized contractions. This feeling of muscular poise and adjustment is pleasurable in a high degree. A keen enjoyment is experienced in the skilful performance of many complex muscular activities. Much of the pleasure of skating, dancing, rowing, tennis, etc., is dependent on this feeling of muscular poise and harmonious contraction. Healthy exercise is always normally enjoyable; but skilful performance greatly enhances the pleasure. A beginner learning to skate, for example, exerts himself fully as much as the accomplished skater. Yet the beginner does not by any means derive the same degree of pleasure from his exertions. Precisely this feeling of balanced and harmonious muscular exertion is experienced by the perfect singer. More than this, the hearer also, through sympathetic sensations, shares the same pleasurable feeling. This is the sensation described as the feeling of soaring, of poise, and of floating, in many descriptions of the "singer's sensations." _Singing on the Breath_ When the voice is perfectly used the tones seem to detach themselves from the singer, and to float off on the breath. Nothing in the sound of the tones, nor in the sympathetic sensations awakened, gives any indication that the breath is checked or impeded in its flow. The current of tone seems to be poured out on the breath just as freely as a quiet expiration in ordinary breathing. This is a purely empirical description of perfect singing. As we know very well, the vocal action is quite different from this description. But the important point is that the phrase "singing on the breath" does very accurately describe the impression made on the hearer by perfect singing. Singing on the breath represents the highest possible degree of purely vocal perfection. One may attend operas and concerts for a whole season and listen to a score of famous singers, and count oneself fortunate to have heard even one artist who attains this standard of tonal excellence. Singing on the breath is an effect of wondrous tonal beauty; it is simply this, pure beauty, pristine and naive. With the slightest degree of throat stiffness or muscular tension, singing on the breath is utterly impossible. So soon as the tones indicate the merest trace of throat contraction, the free outflow of the stream of sound is felt to be checked.