Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. REGISTERS OF THE VOICE. T T may be observed, in listening to an ascend, ing series of tones sung by an untrained or by a badly-trained adult voice, that at certain pitches the tone-quality undergoes a radical change; while a well-trained singer will sing the same series of tones without showing any appreciable break or change in tone-quality, although the highest note will present a marked contrast in timbre to the lowest. The breaks or changes in register so noticeable in the untrained voice are covered or equalized in the voice trained by correct methods. These breaks in both male and female voices occur at certain pitches where the tone-producing mechanism of the larynx changes action, and brings the vocal bands into a new vibratory form.
A register consists of a series of tones produced by the same mechanism.“?Emil Behnke in ” Voice, Song, and Speech. G. Edward Stubbs, in commenting upon the above definition, says: By mechanism is meant the action of the larynx which produces different sets of vibrations, and by register is meant the range of voice confined to a given set of vibrations. In passing the voice from one register to another, the larynx changes its mechanism and calls into play a different form of vibration. The number of vocal registers, or vibratory forms, which the vocal bands assume, is still a matter of dispute, and their nomenclature is equally unsettled. The old Italian singing- musters gave names to parts of the vocal compass corresponding to the real or imaginary bodily sensations experienced in singing them; as chest-voice, throat-voice, head-voice. Madame Seiler, in “ The Voice in Singing,” gives as the result of original investigations with the laryngoscope five different actions of the vocal bands which she classifies as “…