AIu.sic•al sounds differ from each other in loudness, in pitch, in quality. Biot says "all sonorous bodies yield simultaneously an infinite number of sounds of gradually increasing in tensity." This phenomenon is similar to that which obtains for the harmonic's of strings, but the law for the series of harmonics is different for bodies of various forms. _May it not be this difference which produces the particular char acter of sound, called timbre (Klangfarbc, clang tint), which distinguishes each form of body, and causes the sound of a string and that of a vase to produce in us different sensations? Slay it not be owing to the diminution of the intensity in harmonics of each series that we find agree able certain concords that would be intolerable if produced by sounds equally loud ? And may not the quality of each particular substance—of wood or metal, for instance—be due to the su perior intensity of one or another harmonic? We have now sonic dim idea of the natural laws which give us force or loudness, pitch, and quality in music. The whole subject in all its fascinating range and variety is admirably treated in Zahm's Yound and Al usic. Therein may be learned much about the production and transmission of sound, its velocity, reflection, refraction, resonance, and interference. Of pitch it may be only said here that its standard in music is the A string of the violin, which gives the tuning note for ochest•as. It corresponds to A, above middle C of the piano forte. A, as a vibration number of 435 was chosen in 1859 as a standard pitch. This i-s called the French pitch and its, exact vibrations are really 435.45. It is the standard pitch of our orchestras, and since 18912 for all pianofortes. (See PITCH.) All the modifications of sound made by the ingenuity of man in his inventions of string. wood, brass, pipe—as in the organ—and percus sion instruments, from the drum to the piano, give us variety in tonal timbre and are based on the human voice. which with its bass, tenor, alto, and soprano Served as a model for the viol fa In ily.
Helmholtz has considered the analogies of light and sound, both being modes of vibratory motion. ln his psychological optics, he gives the follow- big analogies between the notes of the piano and the colors of the spectrmn: Upon this laboratory experiment some imagina tive theorists have endeavored to rear a system of musical aesthetics, but unsuccessfully, though we have come to speak naturally of color in music. Tone and color, while related, as are all things mundane, are far asunder in terms of art. As the receptive organ of tone and its transmitter to the brain. the ear plays as im portant a part as tone itself. Without it there would be no music, paradoxical as it may sound, for it is the eye that perceives, the ear that hears, the hand that feels, which give us our picture of the world. Under this hypothesis the world then is idea, idealists and materialists meeting amicably on the little strip of territory ealled sensation. The complete apparatus of the cur, the wonderful 'lute of three thousand strings,' called the cortical fibreS after their dis coverer Corti, should be carefully investigated by the student. We may now truthfully affirm, after briefly studying the production of sound and its modifications by instruments, that music is a mode of motion.
But music as a pleasure-evoking emotion! Whence comes it, what is its psychologic basis? It is purely human, for not the most fanciful of poets or extravagant of psychologists can tor ture into formal beauty the songs of ldrds, the growling of the tempest, the sound of the sea. All these things and many more may furnish the starting point, the spring-board of the composer's imaginings, lint artistic they are not. There is no real music in nature. As a play impulse, art has been considered and discussed by many mod ern writers. Schopenhauer, whose intuitions are often superior to other men's logic, calls art "a moment:r•y liberation," and Herbert Spencer de velops his idea, linking it with biological condi tions. In his Principles of Psychology he says that a characteristic of nerve processes is that the superfluous integration of ganglion cells should be accompanied by an inherited readiness to discharge. Thus the 'aimless activity' we call play is the result of a force expended, a force that man as a highly developed animal has more of than is needed for the struggle of existence. In many animals he finds imitation a factor, but Karl Groos in his Ploy of Man believes in impulse and intuition—"the inherited impulse toward prescribed reactions in certain brain-t•acts seems to be in itself a sufficient cause for play without the necessary accompaniment of superfluous energy." Schiller calls play a harmless expendi ture of exuberant strength which is its own ex cuse for action. Lazarus is the exponent of the
reaction theory. When we are tired of natural or physical labor we play, thus recreating our selves. Professor Groos, however, finds in both the surplus expenditure and the recreation theories only partial statements of the truth. For him, play is the impulse toward repetition. and this is a physiological reason for playing to the exhaustion point, which we notice so often. even if we are tired at the beginning. ''Let us recall first," he writes, "the tremendous cance of involuntary repetition to all animal life, for just as the simplest organisms in alternate expansion and contraction and the higher ones in heart-beats and breathing are pervaded hy waves of movements, so also in the sphere of voluntary activity there is a well nigh irresistible tendency to repletion." Play. too, furnishes distraction from quotidian cares. It is an educational factor of prime importance, elaborating immature capacities and influencing the evolution of hereditary qualities. Schiller declares that man alternates between weak and sensuous pleasures, and his dictum that man is full• human only when he plays has, as Professor Groos declares, "definite biological meaning." Conrad Lange defines art "as the capacity pos sessed by men of furnishing themselves and others with pleasure based on conscious self-illusion, which by widening, and deepening human percep tion and emotion tends to preserve and improve the race." This is but an amplification of Sehiller's remark. And Art is hut the play-im pulse immeasurably elevated, yet at its roots possessing a sham objective character. The earliest form musical art, the pantinnitnie dance, was expression of nmsenlar force simulat ing the nets of life." It was symbolical, it ex pressed a feeling, a state of mind. In its genesis art was play of a semi-physiological character. Primitive dancing, comprised music and poetry in solution: later on they became separate and independent arts. Rhythm. the father of or ganized music. played a big ri'de, for rhythm is cosmic. it is manifested in the heart beat—the unit of measure for all the temporal arts—the tides and the movements of the bodies in the interstellar• depths. Dancing accompanied by rudimentary songs—perhaps of only two or three tones—is the first step of the musical art. Emotions were translated in the rough. yet effectively; the pantomime of the savages is al ways clear, attempting as it does the expression of love, anger, terror., hatred. and happiness. flow much the sexual attributes play in the he ginning. of art we cannot say, hut music in the light of modern researches may no longer be called the heavenly Maid. Far from it, indeed. for as Havelock Ellis truthfully says: "ln music the most indefinite and profound mysteries are revealed and placed outside HA as a gracious, marvelous globe: the very secret of the soul is brought forth and set in the audible world. That is why no other art smiles us; with so powerfully religious an appeal as music: no other art tells us such old forgotten spends aloud ourselves. It is in the mightiest. of all instincts. the primi tive sexual traditions of the races before man was that music is rooted. . . The sexual instinct is more poignant and overmastering, more ancient than any as a source of beauty. . . . Beauty is the ehild of love." "Alusic is an emotion become :esthetic. human beings, as llibot says. began by thinking that beautiful which resembled themselves. Primitive art was to t he individual of own species. As it became more disinterested. it exhibited religious qualities, and eventually was transformed into a ritual, a ceremony for the expression of awe or thankfulness to the deity. It had a specific character and one that had hut reunite affiliations with our modern conceptions of art. The natural extrusion of sympathy. the conquest of nature by the intellect. has given its two of the most modern music and landscape painting.. Neither of these had any real existence in the tld-World civilizations: indeed, a feeling for nature in poetry and painting may be said to date front yesterday. The patient flowering of savage. rhytlittlie cries into the score of a Beethoven symphony is only comparable—to men tion purely human proeesses—to the evolution from a South Sea Islander's simple mud hut to the inagnifieent complexities of a Gothic eathe dral. From the sheltering needs of the body moles the noble art of nrchiteeture: from the so cial of intereourse. self-expression, come poetry and Both were the irreprecsible and the irresponsible exhibition of surplus energy. of the play impulse. And on this side is 11111,1e purely sensuous.