The singer is a tone specialist in whom the perception of the pitch and the quality of sounds may not be more acute than in the composer, possibly less so, but he can do what the composer of music often cannot--viz., associate these sensations with muscular movements of a highly perfect character; in different words, he has the technique which others have not in an equal degree. In the singer and speaker there is a very close association between the sensations of the resonance-chambers, the larynx, and other parts of the vocal mechanism, and those from the ear. So perfect does this become from training that the necessary technique at last becomes easy. But it is of the greatest importance that the exact nature of this process be realized by both students and teachers, for weighty considerations grow out of it. We wish to impress the fact that the nature of all neuro-muscular processes is essentially the same. Learning to sing is like learning to talk, and the latter is not radically different from learning to walk. This last is at first slow, imperfect, laborious, and largely a voluntary or willed process, or, more strictly, a series of processes. As progress is made, there is less of the voluntary and more that is involuntary, or what physiologists term reflex. When ideas, feelings, etc., enter into a process which is carried out reflexly, a _habit_ is formed. One may say that talking implies a series of associated reflexes, the parts associated being the respiratory, the laryngeal, and the resonance apparatus. Singing only approaches this condition of reflex action and habit after practice, and yet no air is perfectly sung except when the result is the outcome of a sort of new habit. Every song involves, the learning of new vocal habits. One forms a new habit of an athletic character all the more readily because of previous ones. A man learns to play one game of ball the better, usually, if he have already played at another, the reason being that he has only to modify the action of neuro-muscular mechanisms, not associate new mechanisms together to the same extent as in the formation of a habit of a widely different kind, as rowing a boat. At the same time, one must always unlearn something--break up old habits, to some extent. An opera singer often makes a failure of oratorio at first. The sets of reflexes or the habits, bodily and mental, which he has found valuable for the one form of art do not suit the other perfectly; nevertheless, the same materials are used, the reflexes are in the main the same. He must use preventions, or _inhibitions_, as the physiologists term them. Rather is it that he must avoid doing certain things--_i.e._, modify his neuro-muscular processes or reflexes, than form wholly new ones.