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As the expiratory blast is so important in voice-production, the exercises above recommended should be followed by others in which this principle is specially recognized. Inspire so as to fill the chest to the fullest with considerable rapidity; then allow the breath-stream to pass out with the utmost slowness.
The distinguished physician who wrote them might just as well have said that the generally prevailing theory that in voice-production the muscles of the larynx exist solely to open and close the glottis and to regulate the tension and hence the vibration of the vocal cords, is incorrect.
For whereas they began with the tone as it issued from the singer's lips, the modern physiologist of voice-production begins with the singer's mental audition with the tone as the singer conceives it and to which his vocal tract should automatically set or adjust itself even before the breath of phonation leaves the lungs.
One feeble, hesitating, or otherwise ineffective tone is in itself a stimulus of the wrong kind, sending in unfavorable messages which are only too apt to reach the breathing and other centres concerned in voice-production; but of this subject of nervousness again.
Although the author has not now the tune to give regular lessons in voice-production, he is frequently consulted, especially when abroad, during his vacations, by speakers and especially singers who are anxious to learn how they may increase their efficiency in the profession by which they earn their livelihood and make their reputation; and the reader may be gratified to learn how, in such cases, the writer applies the principles he so strongly recommends to others.
Perhaps one of the causes of our conversational slovenliness is the neglect of these; critics of an older generation have not ceased to lament their decay, but it seems as if better times were coming again, and that as the fundamentals of breathing and voice-production are taught, we shall increase the scope of the power acquired and give it more importance.
The author has examined an entire class of students of voice-production and found only one person who did not succeed in at once giving him a view of the larynx.
So serious, however, is the decision to operate, or the reverse, for the voice-user, that the author recommends that such operations be entrusted only to laryngologists who have some knowledge of their influence on voice-production. It is of the greatest moment to observe that the quality of tones can be made to vary in the highest degree by the joint use of the tongue and soft palate.
Nearly every authority on the physiology of voice-production believes that the vocal tone is produced solely by the vibration of the vocal cords, and that the entire vocal tract situated above the vocal cords is concerned merely with augmenting the tone and determining its timbre or quality. Let us examine this theory and ascertain how tenable it is.
I was once offered a position in America, as 'professor of piano and voice-production' in a place called Schenectady; but I didn't hesitate. I said to myself, better one hundred a year in good old England, than five in a country where the population is so inflated with its importance that I should always be in danger of running amuck.
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