nd falling of the voice
above and below one tone we are able to gauge more or less the
state of civilization of the nation to which the song belongs.
This phrase-tone corresponds, therefore, to the sentence-word,
and like it, gradually loses its meaning as a phrase and fades
into a tone which, in turn, will be used in new phrases as
mankind mounts the ladder of civilization.

At last then we have a single tone clearly uttered, and
recognizable as a musical tone. We can even make a plausible
guess as to what that tone was. Gardiner, in his "Music of
Nature," tells of experiments he made in order to determine the
normal pitch of the human voice. By going often to the gallery
of the London Stock Exchange he found that the roar of voices
invariably amalgamated into one long note, which was always
F. If we look over the various examples of monotonic savage
music quoted by Fletcher, Fillmore, Baker, Wilkes, Catlin,
and others, we find additional corroboration of the statement;
song after song, it will be noticed, is composed entirely of
F, G, and even F alone or G alone. Such songs are generally
ancient ones, and have been crystallized and held intact by
religion, in much the same way that the chanting heard in the
Roman Catholic service has been preserved.

Let us assume then that the normal tone of the human voice
in speaking is F or G [F: f g] for men, and for women the
octave higher. This tone does very well for our everyday life;
perhaps a pleasant impression may raise it somewhat, _ennui_ may
depress it slightly; but the average tone of our "commonplace"
talk, if I may call it that, will be about F. But let some
sudden emotion come, and we find monotone speech abandoned for
impassioned speech, as it has been called. Instead of keeping
the voice evenly on one or two notes, we speak much higher or
lower than our normal pitch.

And these sounds may be measured and classified to a certain
extent according to the emotions which cause them, although
it must be borne in mind that we are looking at the matter
collectively; that is to say, without reckoning on individual
idiosyncrasies of expression in speech. Of course we know that
joy is apt to make us raise the voice and sadness to lower
it. For instance, we have all heard gruesome stories, and
have noticed how naturally the voice sinks in the telling. A
ghost story told with an upward inflection might easily
become humourous, so instinctively do we associate the upwar