formant

American  

[fawr-muhnt] / ˈfɔr mənt /

noun

1. Music. the range and number of partials present in a tone of a specific instrument, representing its timbre.

2. Acoustic Phonetics. one of the regions of concentration of energy, prominent on a sound spectrogram, that collectively constitute the frequency spectrum of a speech sound. The relative positioning of the first and second formants, whether periodic or aperiodic, as of the o of hope at approximately 500 and 900 cycles per second, is usually sufficient to distinguish a sound from all others.

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formant British  

/ ˈfɔːmənt /

noun

1. acoustics phonetics any of several frequency ranges within which the partials of a sound, esp a vowel sound, are at their strongest, thus imparting to the sound its own special quality, tone colour, or timbre

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Etymology

Origin of formant

1900–05; < Latin formant- (stem of formāns ), present participle of formāre to form; see -ant

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

formant

Last, the researchers discovered that the bulls with high mating success had lower formant frequencies than would have been predicted by their body mass alone.

From Scientific American ● Dec. 6, 2012

Taken together, both the bison and koala experiments suggest that variation in formant frequencies may have initially evolved through sexual selection in order to convey information about body size.

From Scientific American ● Dec. 6, 2012

Since there were no preferences for recordings derived from any particular male, the researchers could be sure that the females’ approach behaviors were driven exclusively by formant frequencies, rather than any other possible acoustic variable.

From Scientific American ● Dec. 6, 2012

First, they determined that body mass, but not age, was predictive of the formant frequencies of male bellows, with larger bulls having lower formants.

From Scientific American ● Dec. 6, 2012

Acrostiches formant le nom de Giles du Wes, 893, 1017.

From An Introductorie for to Lerne to Read, To Pronounce, and to Speke French Trewly by Du Wés, Giles