Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. by Robert Millikan;Samuel McMeen;George Patterson;Kempster Miller;Charles Thom
page 36 of 497 (07%)
page 36 of 497 (07%)
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extremes of pitch, and it is not to be understood that any such range
of pitch is utilized in ordinary speech. An average man speaks mostly between the fundamental frequencies of 85 and 160 per second. Many female speaking voices use fundamental frequencies between 150 and 320 vibrations per second. It is obvious from what has been said that in all cases these speaking fundamentals are accompanied by their multiples, giving complexity to the resulting wave-trains and character to the speaking voice. Speech-sounds result from shocks given to the air by the organs of speech; these organs are principally the mouth cavity, the tongue, and the teeth. The vocal cords are _voice-organs_; that is, man only truly speaks, yet the lower animals have voice. Speech may be whispered, using no voice. Note the distinction between speech and voice, and the organs of both. The speech of adults has a mean pitch lower than that of children; of adult males, lower than that of females. There is no close analogue for the voice-organ in artificial mechanism, but the use of the lips in playing a bugle, trumpet, cornet, or trombone is a fairly close one. Here the lips, in contact with each other, are stretched across one end of a tube (the mouthpiece) while the air is blown between the lips by the lungs. A musical tone results; if the instrument be a bugle or a trumpet of fixed tube length, the pitch will be some one of several certain tones, depending on the tension on the lips. The loudness depends on the force of the blast of air; the character depends largely on the bugle. |
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