Orthophony, or Vocal Culture; A Manual of Elementary Exercises for the Cultivation of the Voice in Elocution. Founded Upon Dr. James Rush's Philosophy of the Human Voice, and the System of Vocal Gymnastics Introduced by Mr. James E. Murdoch (Paperback)

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: in the exercise of public speaking, or in that of private reading for social and literary purposes. An exercise of great practical value, as regards the formation of habits in enunciation, is to select from every reading lesson, before and after the regular consecutive reading of a piece, all words and phrases which contain difficult combinations, and repeat them often. PRONUNCIATION. A full statement of the rules of usage in pronunciation, as regards the accent of polysyllables, does not properly fall within the scope of this work, which is designed rather for the cultivation of the voice and the discipline of the organs than as a manual of orthoepy. The most important classes of errors in pronunciation have been already indicated. But this branch of the subject is discussed at greater length in several of the other elocutionary treatises prepared by the author of the present volume. A profitable daily exercise would be the reading aloud of those words in either of our standard national dictionaries in which the various authorities are found to differ, and to adopt as correct the pronunciation in which the greater number of or- thoepists agree. CHAPTER III. MODE OF UTTERANCE. Every sound of the human voice is characterized by one of three modes of utterance, or delivery of the breath. The utterance may be fully vocalized in resonant sound, or it may be entirely aspirated as in a whisper, and it may apply to any degree of force, pitch, movement, etc. The itree modes of utterance are ? 1. Effusive, in which the breath is gently effused or breathed out, without voluntary or conscious effort or impulse; as in all tranquil emotions, or where the depth of feeling overcomes the ordinary activity and variety in the expression, ? in solemnity, reverence, melancholy, ...