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They played just as well at one end of a drawing-room, with a rampe of flowers only separating them from the public, as in their own theatre with all the help of scenery, acoustics, and distance. In a drawing-room naturally the audience is much nearer. I remember one charming party at the Elysee for the Austrian crown prince, the unfortunate Archduke Rudolph.
It seemed to me to meet whatever criticism the eminent dead, buried in that old mausoleum, might have of these modern utterances. I left the Abbey spiritually and mentally elated. The next Sunday I went to hear Charles Spurgeon. It was a wonderful contrast. Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle was a very plain structure of immense proportions but with admirable acoustics.
In accordance with some mysterious law of acoustics, the sound was full three minutes descending the kitchen staircase, entering the keyhole of the kitchen door, and striking on the tympanum of Mash, the cook, who was sitting by the fire, reading the twenty-fifth chapter of "The Buttery and the Boudoir: A Tale of Real Life."
The problem of tone-production is identical, in the common belief, with the problem of the vocal action. Three sciences, anatomy, mechanics, and acoustics, are believed to hold somewhere among them the secret of the voice. All investigation has therefore been carried on along the lines of these three sciences.
In the accepted Vocal Science the terms empirical and scientific are used in a sense entirely different from that which properly attaches to these words. Present knowledge of the operations of the voice is called scientific, solely because it is derived from the sciences of anatomy, acoustics, and mechanics.
The auriferous tooth, the sedentary disposition, the Sunday afternoon wanderlust, the draught upon the delicatessen store for home-made comforts, the furor for department store marked-down sales, the feeling of superiority to the lady in the third-floor front who wore genuine ostrich tips and had two names over her bell, the mucilaginous hours during which she remained glued to the window sill, the vigilant avoidance of the instalment man, the tireless patronage of the acoustics of the dumb-waiter shaft all the attributes of the Gotham flat-dweller were hers.
Many of the rocks are distinguished for their marked and lengthened echoes, and the structure, which in acoustics reflects sounds to the ear, from a point from whence they did not come, reflects images on the eye, from a place very different from where the objects stood which produced them.
Yet all the evening till after midnight there were continuous interruptions and much noise of voices, dishes, and waiters. Men at distant tables laughed out often. It was difficult to hear at best, the acoustics were so bad. The speakers took it as a matter of course at such a 'continuous performance. Some of the Representatives must have thought they were at home in the House at Washington.
To arrive at an understanding of modern methods, the two directions in which vocal theorists have approached the scientific study of the voice must be borne in mind: First, by an investigation of the anatomy of the vocal organs, and of the laws of acoustics and mechanics in accordance with which they operate.
With that frequent yet unexplained phenomenon of acoustics, her voice was so strung that its vibrations reached his numb perceptions as duly as if intended for his ears. He made no sign, in his pride and politeness, both indigenous. But he said to himself, "I don't laugh at her gown, it is what she likes and what she is accustomed to wear.
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