Fifth Exercise: Use the ordinary speaking pitch of the voice and repeat the vowels a, e, i, o, u, with the explosive force; pushing the sounds out as though they did not wish to leave and you were compelled to keep up the pressure in order to prevent them coming back. Be particular to press with the diaphragm only. Practice on low and high tones also.
Sixth Exercise: Repeat the exercise on the same register but use the explosive force, shooting the sounds into the air like the report of a pistol. Practice on low and high tones also.
It is a good plan to practice with speech the same as with voice. That is, produce speech in the three forms, effusive, expulsive, and explosive, and on the three registers, medium, lower, and upper. Any matter can be used for this purpose, special material not being necessary.
In order to bring speech forward and carry it into the air, set before you an imaginary target and direct the voice toward it, raising and lowering the target as you desire to raise and lower the tone. Remember to think the voice out, as you can get it out no other way.
How to Strengthen the Memory
If any one ask me what is the only and great art of memory, I shall say it is exercise and labor. To learn much by heart, to meditate much, and, if possible, daily, are the most efficacious of all methods. Nothing is so much strengthened by practice or weakened by neglect as memory.
—Quintilian
These words, uttered by the scholarly rhetorician of Rome during the first century of the Christian era, are as true today as when they were first spoken. Application, concentration, association, opposition, and use are the principal means for the effectual training and strengthening of the memory. Many systems have been devised for memory training, but none of them is of more than superficial use, the majority making it more difficult to remember the means whereby the thought is to be recalled than to remember the thought itself. They are cumbersome, burdensome, and unworkable. Loisette, in his much exploited system, Assimilative Memory, advises paying particular attention to the location of figures in order to remember them, and he cites the following example:
“Pike’s Peak, the most famous in the chain known as the Rocky Mountains in America, is fourteen thousand one hundred and forty-seven feet high. . . . There are two fourteens in these figures, and the last figure is half of fourteen.”
This is all very well in this particular instance of Pike’s Peak, but what are we to do with mountains that are ten thousand and eighty-five feet, seven thousand and forty-nine feet, or five thousand six hundred and fifty-one feet in height? The specific case works out nicely, but the general case cannot be worked out at all.