the
truth, though not in a scientific way. What is really the truth is
found to be, on analysis, that certain guiding sensations, chiefly
those from the hearing apparatus (ear, nerves, brain), are
insufficient, owing either to natural defect or lack of training; but
that this is not the only explanation is plain from the fact that many
composers with the most vivid musical imagination, the most perfect
auditory memory, and the most acute ear, cannot sing in any but the
most imperfect manner. As we have said before, the speaker of great
power to affect his fellows through tones, or the artistic singer,
must be a sort of vocal athlete. In the athlete there is a very
perfect association into one whole of certain sensations from eye,
skin, muscles, etc., and certain movements. These exist in all men,
but in very unequal degree. The singer is a tone specialist in whom
the perception of the pitch and the quality of sounds may not be more
acute than in the composer, possibly less so, but he can do what the
composer of music often cannot--viz., associate these sensations with
muscular movements of a highly perfect character; in different words,
he has the technique which others have not in an equal degree.

In the singer and speaker there is a very close association between
the sensations of the resonance-chambers, the larynx, and other parts
of the vocal mechanism, and those from the ear. So perfect does this
become from training that the necessary technique at last becomes
easy. But it is of the greatest importance that the exact nature of
this process be realized by both students and teachers, for weighty
considerations grow out of it.

We wish to impress the fact that the nature of all neuro-muscular
processes is essentially the same. Learning to sing is like learning
to talk, and the latter is not radically different from learning to
walk. This last is at first slow, imperfect, laborious, and largely a
voluntary or willed process, or, more strictly, a series of processes.
As progress is made, there is less of the voluntary and more that is
involuntary, or what physiologists term reflex. When ideas, feelings,
etc., enter into a process which is carried out reflexly, a _habit_ is
formed.

One may say that talking implies a series of associated reflexes, the
parts associated being the respiratory, the laryngeal, and the
resonance apparatus. Singing only approaches this condition of reflex
action and habit after practice,