Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 59, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1917 — Measuring the Human Voice. [ARTICLE]

Measuring the Human Voice.

The ordinary sewing room tapeline promises to bring about a small revolution in the musical world as the result of the discoveries made by a Minneapolis musician, who believes he has found an infallible means of determining the true qualities and possibilities of the human voice. By measuring the resonating cavities of the singer or would-be singer, he has been able to answer with precision many of che questions which perplex the ringer. Four years have been spent in working out the thedry that the human voice can be measured and properly catalogued as to its possibilities for future service. In that length of time the voices of 12,000 singers have been measured, many of them members of the prominent grand opera companies of New York and Chicago. Exterior measurements of the resonating cavities of tire- head will give a true index of the kind and quality of the voice possessed by the subject, it is claimed, By this means it can be determined"whether the voice has been developed or trained to its proper range, and whether years of study and work are to be crowned with success or failure. In many of the tests it was found that persons who had no idea of being singers had voices of unusual range and power. Three such discoveries were made among 100 persons tested in Minneapolis. The lung capacity of the individual has little to do with the power and range of the voice, as one frequently hears a deep bass voice from an undersized man, while a large man will be the possessor of a high tenor voice. The deceptive qualities of the human voice are being gaged so accurately by the use of the tapeline that it is possible to tell whether the individual has a tenor, contralto, basso or baritone voice without hearing the sound of the voice. If a person has been overtrained, the tapeline will make the secret known long before it is apparent in the singer’s voice. Many good voices have been ruined by lack of ability to judge their proper qualities and trail them in the proper manner. Many weeks have been devoted to research work in the skull room of the Museum of Natural History in New York City, the investigations being later extended to thousands of N#w Yorkers. The voices of 1000 boys and 300 girls in the public schools were measured by the tapeline, with equally as accurate. These experiments furnished proof that 57 per cent of the women of America hava Bvprano voices, and 43 per cent contralto voices. Among the men, baritone voices are more common, only 43 per cent have tenor voices. Nothing pleases a fat woman more than to have some man call her Ms little girl. Only a man who is wise doubts Ms own - «