Voice production in singing and speaking, based on scientific principles
John Stuart Mill · en
The author now offers, with all respect, but confidence, a few
criticisms on the eminent investigators whose conclusions and methods
he has been discussing.
Madame Seiler was the writer who, as has been already said, brought
more numerous and higher qualifications of a scientific and practical
kind to the investigation of this subject than any other person.
However, the study of physics, involving as it does the use of methods
of extreme precision, tends to beget habits of mind which are not in
all respects the best for the consideration of biological problems.
Madame Seiler and her master, the physicist Helmholtz, regarded the
vocal mechanism very much in the same light as they did their
laboratory apparatus. Only in this way can the author explain some of
Madame Seiler's positions; but on this assumption one can understand
why she should make five registers, and consider them all, apparently,
of equal importance. This latter, together with the tendency generally
to present her views in too rigid a form, was, we think, her great
error.
Behnke admitted that all five registers might be heard, especially in
contraltos, but he did not attach equal importance to each of these
registers.
Mackenzie the author conceives to have been misled by the very method
that he considered a special virtue in his investigations--the
examination of trained singers. Surely, if one would learn what is
Nature's teaching on this subject, he must not draw conclusions from
trained vocalists alone! By training one may learn to walk well on his
hands, but this does not prove such a method the natural one, nor
would it be good reasoning to draw this conclusion, even if a few
individuals were found who could thus walk more rapidly than in the
usual way.
The diversity that Mackenzie found in singers does not, in the
author's opinion, exist in nature; much if not most of it was due to
training, and all that can be said is that several people may sing in
different ways with not greatly different aesthetic results; but such
methods of investigation may, as in this case, lead to conclusions
that are dangerously liberal.
The author holds to-day, as he did when he published his results many
years ago, that "Impressions from general laryngoscopic observations
or conclusions drawn from single cases will not settle these
questions. Very likely differences such as these writers allude to may
exist to a slight degree; but if they do, I question whether they are
sufficiently open to observation ever to be capable of definition; nor
is it likely that they interfere with methods of voice-production
which are alike operative in all persons."