Aristotle seems to have first suggested that rhythm and melodies are motions, as actions are motions, and therefore signs of feeling.  “All melodies are motions,” says Helmholtz.  “Graceful rapidity, gravel procession, quiet advance, wild leaping, all these different characters of motion and a thousand others can be represented by successions of tones.  And as music expresses these motions it gives an expression also to those mental conditions which naturally evoke similar motions, whether of the body and the voice, or of the thinking and feeling principle itself.”  (Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, translated by A. J. Ellis, 1885, p. 250.)

From another point of view the motor stimulus of music has been emphasized by Cyples:  “Music connects with the only sense that can be perfectly manipulated.  Its emotional charm has struck men as a great mystery.  There appears to be no doubt whatever that it gets all the marvelous effects it has beyond the mere pleasing of the ear, from its random, but multitudinous summonses of the efferent activity, which at its vague challenges stirs unceasingly in faintly tumultuous irrelevancy.  In this way, music arouses aimlessly, but splendidly, the sheer, as yet unfulfilled, potentiality within us.” (W.  Copies, The Process of Human Experience, p. 743.)

The fundamental element of transformed motion in music has been well brought out in a suggestive essay by Goblot ("La Musique Descriptive,” Revue Philosophique, July, 1901):  “Sung or played, melody figures to the ear a successive design, a moving arabesque.  We talk of ascending and descending the gamut, of high notes or low notes; the; higher voice of woman is called soprano, or above, the deeper voice of man is called bass. Grave tones were so called by the Greeks because they seemed heavy and to incline downward.  Sounds seem to be subject to the action of gravity; so that some rise and others fall.  Baudelaire, speaking of the prelude to Lohengrin, remarks:  ’I felt myself delivered from the bonds of weight.’  And when Wagner sought to represent, in the highest regions of celestial space, the apparition of the angels bearing the Holy Grail to earth, he uses very high notes, and a kind of chorus played exclusively by the violins, divided into eight parts, in the highest notes of their register.  The descent to earth of the celestial choir is rendered by lower and lower notes, the progressive disappearance of which represents the reascension to the ethereal regions.

“Sounds seem to rise and fall; that is a fact.  It is difficult to explain it.  Some have seen in it a habit derived from the usual notation by which the height of the note corresponds to its height in the score.  But the impression is too deep and general to be explained by so superficial and recent a cause.  It has been suggested also that high notes are