Scientific American's Blunder

Today, Scientific American gets it wrong.  The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. 

______________________

     The lead article in my 1914 Scientific American magazine is about the human singing voice.  Someone’s found an old invention – Koenig’s manometric flame apparatus. It’s a device that lets sound vibrations cause flames to vibrate.  One then measures the flame’s reaction to find frequencies ranging from the fundamental tone through its many overtones.

     Here, they use it to analyze singers’ voices.  To see the structure of the sound that a good singer produces.  Now: to explain what happens next, I have to digress ...

     This was the singing world of bel canto.  That was the beautiful singing style carried on by the great opera singers – Caruso, Callas, Sutherland, Pavarotti ...  My mother was a singer who’d been taught in this tradition. And she told me that I must always place the sound in my mask.   What did that mean?

     Well, it was figurative.  Imagine a mask covering our eyes, nose, and forehead.  The trick was to create the feeling that the sound is emanating from the upper portion of our head.  When we did that, we really did get a smoother, more liquid sound. 

     Okay, back to Scientific American.  To its lead article, by the way.  It shows two cross-sectional drawings of the human head – each showing the soft palate.  When we sing or talk, we lift the soft palate so as to block the flow of air through the nose.  We direct it all through the mouth.  We open the palate when we breathe through our noses. 

     Whoever wrote this article was well aware of the idea of “placing the voice in the mask.”  But they took it literally.  They show us two pictures.  One of singing with the soft palate blocking off flow through the nose.  He compares it to a manometric flame apparatus result – a fundamental tone with only three overtones.  The other shows the soft palate open.  Now air flowing out of both mouth and nose yields a full seven overtones.

     Fascinating.  So, I tried singing a note in my best bel canto voice, while I pinched my nose shut. Nothing changed.  Not a breath of air was passing through my nose. In fact, singing or talking, it’s the same: Our bodies lift our soft palates to direct air through our mouths. 

     The article is quite certain about air through our nose! They’d’ve caught the error instantly if they’d simply pinched their noses as they sang.  By the way, no one signed the article.  Scientific American has, since 1845, educated America.  And it has a fine track record. 

     But this was the era of bel canto – when that mask metaphor was widely used.  And someone felt obliged to provide the science behind it.  Too bad they got it all wrong!

I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work. 

(Theme music)

Analyzing the Human Singing Voice, Scientific American, Vol. CX No. 20, May 16, 1914, pp 407 and 421. 

See this discussion of the effect of sound upon flame: Tyndall and Sound | The Engines of Our Ingenuity

Here is a discussion of “Singing in the Mask”.

Bel canto explained: Bel canto - Wikipedia

One small caveat here. I say the soft palate closes when we speak.  Actually, it might lift slightly for certain consonants – notably for ng, n and m.  

This Episode first aired on