It must be noted that, as a physiological stimulus, a single musical note is effective, even apart from rhythm, as is well shown by Fere’s experiments with the dynamometer and the ergograph.[94] It is, however, the influence of music on muscular work which has been most frequently investigated, and both on brief efforts with the dynamometer and prolonged work with the ergograph it has been found to exert a stimulating influence.  Thus, Scripture found that, while his own maximum thumb and finger grip with the dynamometer is 8 pounds, when the giant’s motive from Wagner’s Rheingold is played it rises to 83/4 pounds.[95] With the ergograph Tarchanoff found that lively music, in nervously sensitive persons, will temporarily cause the disappearance of fatigue, though slow music in a minor key had an opposite effect.[96] The varying influence on work with the ergograph of different musical intervals and different keys has been carefully studied by Fere with many interesting results.  There was a very considerable degree of constancy in the results.  Discords were depressing; most, but not all, major keys were stimulating; and most, but not all, minor keys depressing.  In states of fatigue, however, the minor keys were more stimulating than the major, an interesting result in harmony with that stimulating influence of various painful emotions in states of organic fatigue which we have elsewhere encountered when investigating sadism.[97] “Our musical culture,” Fere remarks, “only renders more perceptible to us the unconscious relationships which exist between musical art and our organisms.  Those whom we consider more endowed in this respect have a deeper penetration of the phenomena accomplished within them; they feel more profoundly the marvelous reactions between the organism and the principles of musical art, they experience more strongly that art is within them."[98] Both the higher and the lower muscular processes, the voluntary and the involuntary, are stimulated by music.  Darlington and Talbot, in Titchener’s laboratory at Cornell University, found that the estimation of relative weights was aided by music.[99] Lombard found, when investigating the normal variations in the knee-jerk, that involuntary reflex processes are always reinforced by music; a military band playing a lively march caused the knee-jerk to increase at the loud passages and to diminish at the soft passages, while remaining always above the normal level.[100]

With this stimulating influence of rhythm and music on the neuro-muscular system—­which may or may not be direct—­there is a concomitant influence on the circulatory and breathing apparatus.  During recent years a great many experiments have been made on man and animals bearing on the effects of music on the heart and respiration.  Perhaps the earliest of these were carried out by the Russian physiologist Dogiel in 1880.[101] His methods were