mes and
locations of the muscles wrongly contracted. This is true, however
thoroughly we may know the anatomy of the vocal organs.

Much of the prevailing confusion about the voice is due to a
misunderstanding of this point. When, for example, the musical critic
asserted that Mme. T---- sang certain tones with "pinched glottis," he
fell into this error. His sympathetic sensations informed him of some
unnecessary tightening of the singer's throat. From these sensations he
seems to have inferred that the glottis-closing muscles were too
strongly contracted. This assumption was not warranted by any
information conveyed in the sympathetic sensations.

It is not necessary now to determine to what extent the muscular
sensations accompanying the listening to voices are purely imaginative,
and to what extent they result from actual, though unconscious,
contractions of the listener's throat muscles. The psychological process
is the same in either case.

Sympathetic sensations of tone always accompany the listening to voices.
While the psychological process is complex, this process is performed
unconsciously and involuntarily. Even though the attention may be
definitely turned to the sympathetic sensations themselves, the mental
imitation and the laryngeal adjustments seldom rise into consciousness.
As a rule, the entire operation is purely sub-conscious. The listener
simply knows how the voices to which he listens are produced. This
knowledge has always been accepted as intuitive; but this is merely
another way of saying that the process of its acquirement is
sub-conscious.

_Direct Sensations of Tone_

In addition to the source of misunderstanding of the vocal action just
mentioned,--the attempt to define the precise muscular contractions
indicated in the sympathetic sensations, another common
misinterpretation of these sensations must be noted. As a consequence of
the sub-conscious character of the sympathetic sensations, the two
classes of muscular sensation of vocal tone, direct and sympathetic, are
frequently confounded and classed together as the "singer's sensations."
A third source of confusion is seen in the attempt to apply the
sympathetic sensations, by formulating rules for the guidance of the
student, in performing specific actions for the management of the vocal
organs. All three of these topics will be considered in a later chapter.
Before approaching this subject let us see just what information may be
der