It is not unexpected that the specifically sexual effects of the
voice and music should be chiefly experienced by women when we remember
that not only in the human species is it the male in whom the larynx and
voice are chiefly modified at puberty, but that among mammals generally it
is the male who is chiefly or exclusively vocal at the period of sexual
activity; so that any sexual sensibility to vocal manifestations must be
chiefly or exclusively manifested in female mammals.
At the best, however, although aesthetic sensibility to sound is highly
developed and emotional sensibility to it profound and widespread,
although women may be thrilled by the masculine voice and men charmed by
the feminine voice, it cannot be claimed that in the human species hearing
is a powerful factor in mating. This sense has here suffered between the
lower senses of touch and smell, on the one hand, with their vague and
massive appeal, and the higher sense, vision, on the other hand, with its
exceedingly specialized appeal. The position of touch as the primary and
fundamental sense is assured. Smell, though in normal persons it has no
decisive influence on sexual attraction, acts by virtue of its emotional
sympathies and antipathies, while, by virtue of the fact that among man's
ancestors it was the fundamental channel of sexual sensibility, it
furnishes a latent reservoir of impressions to which nervously abnormal
persons, and even normal persons under the influence of excitement or of
fatigue, are always liable to become sensitive.
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