Rush, James. The Philosophy of the Human Voice.
The oratory handbook “The Speaker” (1892) advertises Rush’s The Philosophy of the Human Voice as the “book that laid the foundation for all subsequent systems of vocal culture.” Thanks to his fame and influence in oral delivery, Rush’s name is now associated with elocution, though he spent most of his career as a physician and psychologist who wrote on reason and the mind. His background in medicine bears great influence on this work on elocution, as it is the first of its kind to instruct speakers in the physiology of the voice in order to aid instruction in delivery. It is important for students of delivery and the voice, he claims, to “discover the mechanical movements of the organs, and the mode of action of the air upon them” so that one can refer to changes in organs and the “impulses of the air” to specify the desired “nature of described sounds” (88). In addition to inaugurating this new methodology, Rush also introduced the concept of “radical” and “vanishing” movement in the production of phonetic units. Instead of looking at vocal movement at the level of the sentence, like Walker and Steele, Rush claims that each phonetic unit has a beginning “radical” movement (the root of the sound) which the “vanish” will develop in its movement (usually a fading effect, though sometimes the radical turns into a “stressed vanish”).
Rush’s Philosophy of the Human Voice prescribes changes in attitudes towards listening and the voice discernible in the work and attitudes of Rush’s contemporaries. Rush’s attempt to bring the subject of elocution and oral delivery “within the limits of science” (i) follows the trend of medical empiricism Jonathan Sterne deems responsible for the rationalization of sound and that Foucault identifies in his formulation of the “clinical Gaze.” No longer, as for Walker and his predecessors, does the speaker imitate a passion in order to hear the tones of that passion which will then stir the “original” feelings of that passion in his breast. Now the voice—or its organs rather—is a mechanism and its inner workings (once understood) can be adjusted to emit the desired sound. Rush cautions his readers not to compare this process to that of playing a musical instrument, however. While his predecessors have used the Aeolian harp, the reed of the hautboy, and other instruments to illustrate the human voice, Rush claims that “in most points the functions of the two cases are totally dissimilar” (91). These fanciful analogies, he claims, are in dire need of the “pure and transcendent spirit of Baconian science” with its “productive rules” and its devotion to observation and empiricism. Finally, Rush’s “zooming in” on the sound of the phonetic unit, not the melody of a sentence or passage, lays the foundation for systems like Pitman’s phonographic shorthand, Bell’s visible speech, and even modern phonetics and linguistics.