Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The quality or state of being sonorous; resonance.
  • noun A sound.
  • noun Linguistics The degree to which a speech sound is like a vowel. Plosives have the least sonority and vowels have the most.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Sonorousness.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The quality or state of being sonorous; sonorousness.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The property of being sonorous.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun having the character of a loud deep sound; the quality of being resonant

Etymologies

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Examples

  • He employed extremes in sonority and revels in distortions and interruptions, often through the ironic use of recognizable fragments from the everyday world.

    A Fierce Enthusiasm Leon Botstein 2010

  • He employed extremes in sonority and reveled in distortions and interruptions, often through the ironic use of recognizable fragments from the everyday world.

    The Contemporary Appeal of Gustav MahlerMahler and Beyond 2010

  • Phonic and emphatic before actively phatic, making noise before contact, the monosyllabic sigh at the core of all Romantic sonority is a phonic surge before it can be coded as a monosyllabic signal in some discursive circuit with the

    Phonemanography: Romantic to Victorian 2008

  • For Pfau, this model offers an experience of music in which its "sheer sonority is said to absolve us from the contingent" — from the world of representation as we know it in modernity.

    Response to Thomas Pfau 1999

  • No longer considered is the material and tonal specificity of music as "sonority" (Klangbild) as it is shaped by countless decisions in the area of orchestration, instrumentation, tonal color, to say nothing of the innumerable contingencies that shape a given musical performance.

    The Voice of Critique: Aesthetic Cognition After Kant, 1999

  • The Early Music movement has enriched musical life today, but its basic philosophy as it is lucidly exposed in every paragraph of Bilson's letter is an attempt to impoverish it, to stimulate a sense of deep satisfaction with a single kind of sonority, and a single style of interpretation.

    Early Music: An Exchange Bilson, Malcolm 1990

  • For the last thirty-six years poor France had been afflicted with all sorts of pernicious things: that "sonority," the tribune; that hubbub, the press; that insolence, thought; that crying abuse, liberty: he came, and for the tribune, he substituted the

    Napoleon the Little Victor Hugo 1843

  • His instrument (an old classical guitar that he calls "Trigger") is famous for the hole he has worn into its face by decades of picking, and its distinctive twang has the same kind of sonority as the sharp nasal sound of his voice.

    The Globe and Mail - Home RSS feed 2009

  • This instrument has rapidly become a legend, and is still used today, altough samples have replaced the real thing so that very often music producers use huge sample libraries or hardware keyboards / workstations to achieve this kind of sonority, and often the result is a cold and 'dead' sound, with no vitality, no warmth, nothing that even compares to the unpredictability and genuineness of the real thing.

    AvaxHome RSS: 2009

  • The duo's music moves and warms us through its unique blend of the cello's sonority and the kora's harp-like ringing tones.

    Warm Up to a Meeting of Two Classical Minds Jim Fusilli 2011

Comments

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  • First to list? I'm surprised.

    July 11, 2008