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It is obvious that the tongue also is a highly responsible member of the vocal tract. Raise it too high, and you bring it so close to the hard palate that the mouth becomes too small for free, resonant voice-emission. The tone becomes wheezy. Let the tongue lie too flat, and the mouth-cavity becomes too large and cavernous for tense, vibrant voice-emission. The tone becomes too open.
Not only is the voice-emission pure, but there is no needless fatigue of voice, because all superfluous movement of the glottis is avoided. The "check glottid" or glottic shock, on the other hand, involves an undue effort of the vocal muscles, and the compression of the vocal cords causes irritation.
There are isolated cases of deformed soft palate with uvula so enormous that it cannot be raised. In such cases, one of which is instanced by Kofler, a surgical operation being out of the question, the patient simply has to give up singing. Enlarged tonsils, whether from inflammation or other causes, also have to be operated on, as their enlargement obviously hinders free voice-emission.
Of what use is the nasal passage as a cavity of resonance if, in order to prevent a nasal quality of tone, the passage during voice-emission is shut off by the action of the soft palate, or by the combined action of the soft palate, uvula and tongue?
When it is considered that the larynx, in which the vocal cords are situated, is permeated by a network of muscles through which it is capable of some 16,000 adjustments and readjustments of shape, all of them pertinent to voice-production, and that the same thing also is true of the pliable portions of the resonance cavities; that these muscles act in response to an even finer network of nervous filament; and that the constant shaping and reshaping of various parts of the vocal tract during voice-emission is directed by messages from the mind, soul, or art-sense of the singer, messages which travel via nerve to muscle the only route by which they can travel it becomes possible to appreciate the importance of the sensory or psychological function which, I hold, should be added to the purely physical ones of motor, vibration and resonance.
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