The Speech of Monkeys

I believe if we could apply the rule of perspectives and throw our vanishing point far back beyond the chasm that separates man from his Simian prototype, that we would find one unbroken outline tangent to every circle of life from man to protozoa in language, mind, and matter. CHAPTER XXIII. The Human Voice--Human Bagpipe--Human Piccolo, Flute, and Fife--The Voice as a Whistle--Music and Noise--Dr. Bell and his "Visible Speech." One of the very curious feats which I have performed with the phonograph is the conversion of the human voice into the sounds of various instruments. I had my wife sing the familiar Scotch ballad, "Comin' through the Rye," to the phonograph while the cylinder was rotating at the rate of about forty revolutions per minute. Each word in the song was distinctly pronounced and the music rendered in a plain, smooth tone. I then increased the speed of the machine to about one hundred and twenty per minute, at which rate I reproduced the song. It was a very perfect imitation of the bagpipe with no sign whatever of articulation. The melody was preserved with only a change of time. The speech character was so completely destroyed that I repeated this record to a large audience in which were several eminent musicians, not one of whom suspected that it was not a real bagpipe solo. In like manner I have converted the sounds of the voice into a very perfect piccolo, flute, fife, and into a fairly good imitation of a whistle sound. To produce the whistling effect and the fife sound the rate of speed must be necessarily very high, and some notes will not be perfectly converted for some reason which I have not yet fully understood. Some voices are much more easily converted into the flute effect than others. To get the best flute sounds, a full, smooth, mezzo-soprano gives the best effect. In reversing the operation, the sounds of these instruments can be made to imitate the human voice somewhat, but not exactly, not only in the fact that the modulation is wanting and there is no semblance to consonant sounds, but the tone itself differs in quality from that of the voice.