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stereophonic sound
stereophonic sound sound recorded simultaneously through two or more electronic channels. For live recordings, microphones are placed in different positions relative to the sound source. The recorded sound is played back through loudspeakers placed more or less as the recording microphones were pla...
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Edme Mariotte
Edme Mariotte , 1620?-1684, French physicist. His De la nature de l'air (1676) includes a statement of Boyle's law (see gas laws ), which he discovered independently and which is sometimes called Mariotte's law in France. One of the founders of experimental physics, Mariotte investigated a wide r...
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Grimm's law
Grimm's law principle of relationships in Indo-European languages, first formulated by Jakob Grimm in 1822 and a continuing subject of interest and investigation to 20th-century linguists. It shows that a process—the regular shifting of consonants in groups—took place once in the develo...
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etymology
etymology , branch of linguistics that investigates the history, development, and origin of words. It was this study that chiefly revealed the regular relations of sounds in the Indo-European languages (as described in Grimm's law ) and led to the historical investigation of language in the 19th ce...
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decibel
decibel , abbr. dB, unit used to measure the loudness of sound . It is one tenth of a bel (named for A. G. Bell), but the larger unit is rarely used. The decibel is a measure of sound intensity as a function of power ratio, with the difference in decibels between two sounds being given by dB=10 log...
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Puget Sound
Puget Sound , arm of the Pacific Ocean, NW Wash., connected with the Pacific by Juan de Fuca Strait, entered through the Admiralty Inlet and extending in two arms c.100 mi (160 km) S to Olympia. The sound, which receives many streams from the Cascade Range, has numerous islands and is navigable for ...
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sonic boom
sonic boom shock wave produced by an object moving through the air at supersonic speed, i.e., faster than the speed of sound. Since sound is a mechanical disturbance that propagates through the air, there is a limit to its speed. An object such as an airplane, moving through the air, generates so...
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echo sounder
echo sounder an older instrumentation system for indirectly determining ocean floor depth. Echo sounding is based on the principle that water is an excellent medium for the transmission of sound waves and that a sound pulse will bounce off a reflecting layer, returning to its source as an echo. The...
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Mach number
Mach number [for E. Mach ], ratio between the speed of an object and the speed of sound in the medium in which the object is traveling. An airplane that has the velocity of Mach 3.0 is traveling at three times the speed of sound as measured in the prevailing atmospheric conditions.
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phonetics
phonetics , study of the sounds of languages from three basic points of view. Phonetics studies speech sounds according to their production in the vocal organs (articulatory phonetics), their physical properties (acoustic phonetics), or their effect on the ear (auditory phonetics). All phonetics are...
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