Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/118

only by experience; the voice must be, as it were, tuned to it. It is well if this experience can be gained by the orator before he faces his audience; but he must remember that trying his voice in an empty room is an altogether different thing from actually using it in the same place packed with a solid mass of wheezing, coughing, and perspiring humanity. Handel is said to have comforted himself, when one of his oratorios had been performed to empty benches, by the reflection that "it made ze moosic shound all ze better," but this consolation is denied to the orator. There are some buildings which are so utterly bad from the acoustic point of view that even experienced speakers are little better off than novices. The House of Lords has, or used to have, an unenviable reputation in this respect. A story is told of the late Lord Lyttelton that, after exhausting his voice in vain efforts to make his brother peers hear a motion which he wished to propose, he in despair wrote it down and asked the clerk at the table to read it out. That functionary, however, was quite unable to decipher the writing, and Lord Lyttelton complained that he was cut off from communication with his fellows. Science has not always been successful in coping with the acoustic difficulty. In 1848 it was so difficult for speakers to make themselves heard in the French Chamber, that a committee, consisting of the leading scientific luminaries of the day—such as Arago, Babinet, Dumas (the chemist, not the author of "The Three Musketeers"), Becquerel, Chevreul (the centenarian who died the other day), Pouillet, Regnault, and Duhamel—was appointed to study the case and suggest a remedy. After numerous experiments they hit on a contrivance, designed on the most scientific principles, which was to make the orator's voice ring like a clarion to the farthest benches. The last state of the speaker, however, was worse than the first; he felt as if his voice was stifled under a huge night-cap, and the highly scientific sound-reflector had to be discarded as a failure. Indeed, modern public buildings are so often defective in this respect that I am not surprised to find M. Ch. Gamier, who designed the Grand Opéra in Paris, exclaiming dolefully, "The science of theatrical acoustics is still in its infancy, and the result in any given case is uncertain." So impressed is he with the shortcomings of modern architecture as regards the conveyance of sound, that he frankly confesses that, in the construction of the Opera-House, he "had no guide, adopted no principle, based his design on no theory"; he simply left the acoustic properties of the building to chance. The result has not been altogether satisfactory, though it has been no worse than in many other buildings where the architect did his best to make the acoustic conditions perfect. One of the most remarkable buildings from the acoustic point of view that I have ever seen is the beehive-shaped Temple in Salt Lake City. It