LEARNING TO REINFORCE THE TONE
And now we turn from the second step in the training to the third and last step—the reinforcing of the supported and freed tone. It is again a freeing process. This time we are to free the cavities now closed against the tone; we are to use the walls of these cavities as sounding-boards for tone, as they were designed to be, so reinforcing the tone and letting it issue a resonant, bell-like note with the carrying power resonance alone can give, instead of the thin, dull, colorless sound which conveys no life to the word into which it is moulded by the organs of speech. How shall we free these cavities? I find myself now impatient of the medium of communication we are using. I want to make the tone for you. I want, for instance, to shut off the nasal cavity and let you hear the resultant nasal note, thin, high, unresonant, which hardly reaches the first member of my audience; then I want you to hear the tone flood into the nasal cavity, and, reinforced there by the vibration from the walls of the cavity, grow a resonant, ringing, bell-like note, which will carry to the farthest corner of the room without the least increase in loudness. But we must be content with the conditions imposed by print.
First, you must realize that so-called "talking through the nose" is not talking through the nose at all, but rather failure to do so—that is, instead of letting the tone flood into the nasal cavity, to be reinforced there by striking against the walls of the cavity, which act as sounding-boards for the tone confined within that cavity, we shut off the cavity, and refuse the tone its natural reinforcement. It takes on, as a result, a thin, unresonant quality which we call nasal, although it is thin and unpleasing because it lacks true nasal resonance. The only remedy lies in ceasing to shut off the cavity. Think the sound ͞oo. Let the tone on which it is to be borne grow slowly in thought, filling, filling, and, as it grows, flooding the whole face. Let it press against your lips (in thought only as yet), feel your nostrils expand, your face grow alive between the eyes and the upper lip, that area so often inanimate, lifeless, even in a mobile, animated countenance. Now let the sound come, but let it follow the thought, flood the face, let the nostrils expand, feel the nasal cavity fill with sound; let it go on up into the head and strike the forehead and the eye-sockets and the walls of all the cavities so unused to the impact of sound, which should never have been shut out. Now begin, with lips closed, a humming note, m-m-m. Let it come flooding into the face, until it presses against the lips, demanding the open mouth. Now let it open the mouth into the e. Repeat this over and over—m-ē, m-ē, m-ē. Don't let the tone drop back as the mouth opens. Keep it forward behind the upper lip, which it has made full, and which, playing against, it tickles until we must let the tone escape. Just as much of the day as possible, think the tone in a flood into the face, and as often as possible hum and let it escape, noting its increasing resonance. It will increase in resonance, I promise you. It will lose its thin, high-pitched nasal quality, and grow mellow and rich and ringing.
And so, with chest lifted, diaphragm at work, throat open, tongue free, jaws relaxed, and all the cavities concerned in vocalization open to the tone, as you breathe and yawn and hum, let it issue a full, round, resonant, singing note to add itself to the music of the world.