After taking a few lessons the student may find that he has a hitherto unsuspected talent for the ventriloquist’s art, which only needs proper cultivation to be made a source of amusement and profit. As in music, there is a certain technique which must be thoroughly mastered before one can become proficient, and certain exercises conducing to voice production and culture which must be faithfully gone through with before one can give an efficient exhibition before the public. One must learn how to use the mouth and tongue to achieve certain results, how to speak interiorly with entirely motionless and almost closed lips, and how to make each of the sounds or voices used distinctive in tone, pitch and character.

The successful ventriloquist must also be cool, confident and something of an actor.   The voices
to him present no illusion, and he can judge of his success only by their effect upon his audience. I say no illusion, but this is not quite true; for though he knows that he is creating the sounds, if he is thoroughly proficient, there seems a sort of isolation between himself and the voice which discourses with him. If he is talking with “a man on the roof ” and his performance is perfect, the voice almost seems even to him to be that of another person and he enters into argument with it with as much earnestness as if this were so.
In one respect the ventriloquist’s work is more difficult than that of an actor.

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