“All bodies and instruments, then, employed for producing musical sounds, emit, besides their fundamental tones, tones due to higher order of vibrations. The Germans embrace all such sounds under the general term _Obertöne_. I think it will be an advantage if we, in England, adopt the term _over-tones_, as the equivalent of the term employed in Germany. One has occasion to envy the power of the German language to adapt itself to requirements of this nature. The term _Klangfarbe_, for example, employed by Helmholtz, is exceedingly expressive, and we need its equivalent also. You know that color depends upon rapidity of vibrations--that blue light bears to red the same relation that a high tone does to a low one. A simple color has but one rate of vibration, and it may be regarded as the analogue of a simple tone in music. A _tone_, then, may be defined as the product of a vibration which cannot be decomposed into more simple ones. A compound color, on the contrary, is produced by the admixture of two or more simple ones; and an assemblage of tones, such, as we obtain when the fundamental tone and the harmonics of a string sound together, is called by the Germans a _Klang_. May we not employ the English word _clang_ to denote the same thing, and thus give the term a precise scientific meaning akin to its popular one? And may we not, like Helmholtz, add the word _color_ or _tint_ to denote the character of the clang, using the term _clang-tint_ as the equivalent of _Klangfarbe_?” (Sound: A course of Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain by John Tyndall, LL.D., F.R.S., Professor of Nat. Phil. in the Royal Institution and in the Royal School of Mines. English edition, pp. 116-118.)--Tr.
[11] As to the characteristic sounds of the different keys, the views of musicians are to the present day divided. Many even of our most eminent theorists, as Hauptmann, for example, in Leipsig, have maintained that all keys (_Tonarten_) are only transpositions of one major and minor key, and that like musical effects may be produced with one as well as with the other. The majority of musicians are, however, of the opinion that each key has its peculiar character, and that by transposition into another key the musical effect is changed. My son, Carl Seiler, has discovered that each key has its own peculiar, prominent over-tones, which determine its distinctive character. A table of all the keys (_Tonarten_), in which the prominent over-tones of each are given, shows also that the mutual relation of the keys (_Tonarten_) is elucidated by these over-tones. And thus again scientific investigation confirms what the founders of the theory of music, with their sound sense for the beautiful, recognized as correct.