“In such exercises it is necessary to remember that on a low key it is best to speak slowly, and swiftly on a higher key. The difference is clearly seen in comparing the lower and upper tones of a piano or violin, and the human voice is also a stringed instrument” (Broadus, Preparation and Delivery, p. 454).
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I find this a strange comment; I don’t understand it. Might just be dumb singer syndrome, but it’s lost on me. That’s one thing. The other is outright disagreement with the final statement. The voice is not a stringed instrument. It is a wind instrument and what vibrates in our larynges is much less like strings than it is like a set of double reeds: a pair of lips with a vibratory mechanism that is a great deal more complex than the vibration of a string. Metaphors are grand, but this particular metaphor in my estimation would be the literary… Read more »
So the clarinet would be a better analogue but does the point stand? Ought an orator speak slowly when using a low tone and faster when using higher ones? I’m guessing yes, most of the time. Doesn’t most music puts the slow emotional part down low and the fast intellectual part up high? I hear they stimulate different parts of the brain.
To-may-to, to-mah-to.
Low and high are relative terms in music. There is no such thing as a definitively low key, unless in fact you are talking about a key on the leftmost side of any two keys on a keyboard, for example, and even then “low” and “high” are metaphors that have to do with frequencies of vibration. If the author meant to observe that lower pitch frequencies vibrate slower, and higher pitch frequencies vibrate faster, then he should have avoided the word “key” and that would have been an exercise in stating the obvious. But to assert that the music one… Read more »