THE MUSICAL EAR.

Evening Star, Issue 3908, 2 September 1875, Page 3

THE MUSICAL EAR.

{Good Words).

The mystery of the musical ear has not been solved. Yet some things are known about it. There is probably no ear so radically defective—except a deaf ear—as to be incapable of a certain musical training. The curate who arrives in a High Church parish without the notion of the right note to intone upon/and with the vaguest powers of singing it when it is given him, in a few months learns to take fairly the various pitches in the service ; and Mr Hullah tells us that, owing to the spread of musical cultivation during the last forty years, the sort of people (without the dimmest sense of musical note) whom ho used frequently to come across, have almost ceased *to exist. But still the question remains—a physiological one—whj' - is one ear musical and another not? Professor Helmholtz, whose discoveries in the sound-world are only comparable to the discoveries of Newton in the world of light, has put forth an ingenious theory somewhat to this effect ;—He discovered within the eai’, and soaked in a sensitive fluid, rows and rows of microscopic nerves several hundred in number—each one of which, like the string of a pianoforte, he believed vibrated to *some note ; therefore we were to infer that just as a note sung outside a piano will set up in the corresponding wire a sympathetic vibration, so any sound or sounds ’ in the outer world represented by a nerve wire ; or nerves in the car could be beard by the ear ; and, as a consequence, any absence of or defect in these internal nerve-wires would prevent us from hearing the sound as others bettor constituted Avould hear it. The next direct question of musical ear now becomes one of inherited tendency and special training. Tim musical oar is the ear that has learned—by constantly using the same intervals—to recognise the tones and semitones of the usual scale, and to regard all quarter tones as exceptions and subtleties not to be taken account of in the general construction of ■ melody and harmony. Now, our octave and our division of the octave into tones and semitones is not artificial but natural, founded as much upon certain laws of sound-vibration as our notation (if I may so say) of color is founded upon the laws of vibration. But, although the selection of eight notes with their semitones is the natural ami scientific scale, seeing that the car is capablehif hearing impartially vast numbers of other vibrations of sound which produce vast numbers of other intervals, quarter notes, & c., Aviiat we have to do in training the musical oar is just to harp on the notes .which compose the musii cal scaley in various keys, and on these

only. In this way the ear gets gradually weaned from sympathy with what is out of tune; ceases to be doglike, or savage-like, and becomes the cultured organ for recognising the natural order and progression of those measured and related vibrations which we call musical sound. Of course a tendency like this can be inherited just as much as any other; and in almost all cases it can be improved and cultivated. We have mentioned Professor Helmholtz’s theory, but we have reason to think that ho is not, on consideration, prepared to endorse it fully; the little rows of minute nerve-wires, each vibrating to a definite sound, is indeed a fascinating idea, but whether true or false, it enables us, by a kind of physical parable, to understand the sort of way in which the ear. being capable of pei’ceiving a large variety of sounds, may be trained to give the preference to certain ones by constantly allowing itself to select certain notes, and establish between them definite and fixed relations. The exact physical mechanism which enables the ear to do this may have yet to be discovered, but that it exists there can be no doubt, and the use and cultivation of it is, in fact, the use and cultivation of what we call “ an ear for music,”