Holmes folded up his cheque and placed it carefully in his note-book. "I am a poor man," said he, as he patted it affectionately and thrust it into the depths of his inner pocket.
Copyright, 1904, by A. Conan Doyle, in the United States of America.
The more particular object of this article is to describe some of the various styles of Parliamentary speakers, and to give a pictorial presentment of short passages from the speeches of members who participate frequently in the debates, showing the approximate pitch and modulation of the voices. For the latter purpose nearly two hundred different speeches were "sampled."
Anyone familiar with the theories and principles of speech sounds knows that it is an impossibility to render accurately the multitude of sounds occurring in even a short typical passage. Different plans for writing speech sounds have been tried with varying success. Any system aiming at scientific accuracy implies a degree of minute analysis which is impracticable in an endeavour to procure an estimate of the pitch and average inflection of numerous voices heard at some distance, and under conditions not favourable to close scrutiny. In speech a single syllable may traverse half an octave, a semitone, or a fraction of a semitone, and it may be jerked out in separate tones, or undulate in portamento. There is usually, however, a prime sound, which may be more prominent and longer sustained than the other sounds that go to round off the syllable. With a succession of those prime sounds, which, for convenience, may be called notes, it is possible to give a rough notion (which is all that is claimed here) of how a speaker's voice rises and falls in the hearing of an ordinary listener.
Each of the samples represents an average bit of speaking. The notes given must not be taken literally. If the speaking tone, for instance, was somewhere about D, and descended to somewhere about A, those notes D and A would be near enough for the purpose of these observations. True musical intervals are out of the question, but the accompanying diagrams have been written on the bass clef in the natural key, this being the most simple and direct way of showing roughly the variation as between different speakers, and the prevailing pitch, as nearly as it has been possible to discover them.
The natural speaking notes of a man's voice vary considerably in different places and in different circumstances. A certain accomplished cathedral singer who has studied this question puts the average pitch of preachers' voices at about F sharp in the bass clef. He has heard preachers ascend to top tenor G and A, descending to C (above the bass clef), improbable though it sounds. Others he has observed speaking effectively from B to F (bass clef), with F as the top tone. He himself, with an exceptionally deep voice, has in speaking an average pitch of low G, with inflections upwards to F and downwards to C below the clef. One acknowledged authority gives the ordinary range of the speaking voice of a man as the notes comprised in the bass clef, i.e., G to A, B flat to F sharp above the clef being occasionally used. Another authority points out that a good tone is desired for singing within two octaves, whereas, in speaking, an audible tone is desired at pitches generally within one-fifth, and only occasionally extending to an octave. Still another authority says that the part of a bass voice most often brought into requisition will consist of the notes D, E, F, G, and in the case of a tenor voice of G, A, B, C, the dominant note for the bass being E or F, and for the tenor A or B. At the same time it is admitted by one of those authorities that great actors have used with best effect their lowest notes, i.e., extending upward from C below the bass clef. Of course, the declamation of the actor as well as that of the clergyman is more favourable to a sustained and singing quality of tone than ordinary speech. The same is true to a certain extent in the case of Parliamentary speaking.