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overtone

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Medical, Acronyms, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.10 sec.

overtone

In acoustics, a faint higher tone contained within almost any musical tone. A body producing a musical pitch—such as a taut string or a column of air within the tubular body of a wind instrument—vibrates not only as a unit but simultaneously also in sections, resulting in the presence of a series of overtones within the fundamental tone (i.e., the one identified as the actual pitch). Harmonics are a series of overtones resulting when the partial vibrations are of equal sections (e.g., halves, thirds, fourths). Partials are nonharmonic overtones—that is, tones the frequencies of which lie outside the harmonic series. Overtones contribute greatly to the timbre of a given sound source, even though few listeners are aware of hearing any pitch except the fundamental. There are a few rare examples of the human voice creating overtones, notably in the chants of the Tibetan monks and the songs of the Tuvan throat singers. The latter can sometimes produce two overtones.


overtone
Music Acoustics any of the tones, with the exception of the fundamental, that constitute a musical sound and contribute to its quality, each having a frequency that is a multiple of the fundamental frequency


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Her appreciation of the ridiculous was keen, and in all things she unerringly saw and felt, where it existed, the touch of sham, the overshading, the overtone.
Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations--this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your bookshelves.
 
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