The Human Voice--Human Bagpipe--Human Piccolo, Flute, and
Fife--The Voice as a Whistle--Music and Noise--Dr. Bell and his
"Visible Speech."
One of the very curious feats which I have performed with the phonograph
is the conversion of the human voice into the sounds of various
instruments. I had my wife sing the familiar Scotch ballad, "Comin'
through the Rye," to the phonograph while the cylinder was rotating at
the rate of about forty revolutions per minute. Each word in the song
was distinctly pronounced and the music rendered in a plain, smooth
tone. I then increased the speed of the machine to about one hundred and
twenty per minute, at which rate I reproduced the song. It was a very
perfect imitation of the bagpipe with no sign whatever of articulation.
The melody was preserved with only a change of time. The speech
character was so completely destroyed that I repeated this record to a
large audience in which were several eminent musicians, not one of whom
suspected that it was not a real bagpipe solo. In like manner I have
converted the sounds of the voice into a very perfect piccolo, flute,
fife, and into a fairly good imitation of a whistle sound. To produce
the whistling effect and the fife sound the rate of speed must be
necessarily very high, and some notes will not be perfectly converted
for some reason which I have not yet fully understood. Some voices are
much more easily converted into the flute effect than others. To get the
best flute sounds, a full, smooth, mezzo-soprano gives the best effect.
In reversing the operation, the sounds of these instruments can be made
to imitate the human voice somewhat, but not exactly, not only in the
fact that the modulation is wanting and there is no semblance to
consonant sounds, but the tone itself differs in quality from that of
the voice.
[Sidenote: CONTOUR OF SOUNDS]
Among other respects in which the vocal sounds of man and Simian
resemble is in the contour of the sounds, which I have defined
elsewhere. I have called attention to the fact that by reversing the
cylinder of the phonograph and repeating the sound recorded thereon that
a musical note or sound would repeat alike each way. Most of the sounds
made by other animals do this, but those made by man and Simian alike
show modulation, not, however, equally distinct. The notes of birds
repeat alike both ways except their order is reversed. Again, to magnify
the sounds as I have shown it can be done, allows you to inspect them,
as it were, under the microscope, and this examination shows the contour
of the sounds of these two genera to resemble.
Dr. Alexander Melville Bell has shown, in his work on "Visible Speech,"
that the organs brought into use in the production and modification of
sounds must work in harmony with each other; hence it is that by a study
of the external forms of the mouth the movements of all the organs used
in making any sound can be determined with such certainty that
deaf-mutes can be, and have been, successfully taught to distinguish
these sounds by the eye alone. And it was by such a method that I set
out to read the temple inscriptions from the ruins of Palenque, some
years ago, at which time I had not heard of Dr. Bell's learned and
excellent work. The main feature of those glyphs, by which I was guided,
was the outline of the mouth, which the artist had sought to preserve
and emphasise at the cost of every other feature, and by this process I
found to my satisfaction some ten or twelve sounds or phonetic elements
of the speech used by these people; but not knowing the meaning of the
sounds in that lost tongue, I did not attempt to verify them, but when I
find the time to devote to them I believe I can accomplish that.
[Sidenote: TRIP TO AFRICA]
It is a part of my purpose, in my trip to Africa, to try to secure
photographs of the mouths of the great apes while they are in the act of
talking, and to this end I am having constructed an electric trigger,
with which to operate my photo-camera at long range, and I shall try to
furnish to the eminent author of "Visible Speech" some new and novel
subjects for study.