on is to be much more forcibly effected, and completed
almost instantaneously. This is _explosive_ utterance.

In the cultivation of the voice either one of two ends is generally kept
in view--its improvement for speaking or its improvement for singing;
but progress may be made towards both ends by the same study, and those
exercises which benefit the singing voice benefit the speaking voice,
and _vice versa_. _The distinction between speaking tones and singing
tones should be clearly understood._ Musical tones are produced by
isochronous (equal-timed) vibrations of the vocal organs continued for
some length of time. Hence, a musical tone is a _note_, which may be
prolonged at will without varying in pitch, either up or down. A
speaking tone, on the contrary, is produced by vibrations which are not
isochronous; it is not a _note_, properly so called, and can not be
prolonged, without varying in pitch. Musical tones are _discrete_,--the
voice passes from pitch to pitch through the intervals silently. In
speaking, _every_ tone, however short the time taken in uttering it,
passes from one pitch to some other through an interval _concretely_,
that is, with continuous vocality; though, with respect to one another,
speech syllables, like notes in music, are discrete. This may be
exemplified by uttering the words, "_Where are you going?_" In singing
these words, they may be uttered on the same note, or on different
notes, or, indeed, with different notes for the same word; but the voice
_skips_ from note to note through the intervals. In speaking the words,
each is uttered with an inflection or intonation in which the voice
varies in pitch, but passes through the interval concretely; the
separate words, however, and the separate syllables (if there were any)
being uttered discretely. Musical utterance might be graphically
illustrated by a series of horizontal lines of less or greater length
succeeding one another at different distances above or below a fixed
horizontal line. In a similar notation for speech utterance the lines
would all be curved, to represent the concrete passage through the
various intervals. _It is the concrete intonation of every syllable and
monosyllabic word which gives to speech its distinctive character from
music._ Each syllable and monosyllabic word is called a =concrete=, and
_it is with the concrete in all its various possibilities of utterance
that voice culture has mainly to do_.

The interv