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��3l6 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899
sing exactly the interval we should sing in their place. The false intonation was due usually to precisely the same causes which produce it in our own singers. Sometimes it is an untrained or defective ear; there is just as much difference between Indian as between white singers in this respect. Sometimes it seemed to be due to an imperfect correlation of the ear and the vocal ap- paratus, just as it is with us. Sometimes it comes from pitching a song too high or too low. In short, an Indian singer, for the greater part, does just what a white singer of his grade of musical culture would do under the same conditions.
But I have observed also special causes for aberrations from the pitch intended by aboriginal singers. Chief among these is emphasis. I have frequently known Indian singers to emphasize a tone by striking it ahead of the beat and from a quarter of a tone to a tone above pitch. When I noted these tones down as bye-tones, I was met by the criticism that I had written two tones when only one was intended. When I played it emphatically as a simple syncopation, the Indian declared it to be correct.
I have also found Indians vary from pitch under stress of emotion, especially in love-songs. I have noted down intervals as I heard them, only to be told that they were wrong. The Indian meant to sing a plain diatonic interval, for he declared this to be correct when I played it. Although he had actually sung it from a quarter to a half tone below pitch, he would not tolerate my playing of anything else than the plain diatonic interval. All of this goes to show, among other things, that the Indian does not make nice discriminations in the matter of pitch. It shows also, what is very clear from all my experience, that what the Indian is thinking about is purely the expression of his feeling, and not the nicety of his intervals, — that has to take care of itself. But it makes the evidence as to the forms spontaneously assumed by his songs all the more forcible.
I have also found that increase of power is almost always ac- companied with increased elevation of pitch, and diminution of
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