formant

[ fawr-muhnt ]

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.

formant

/ 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

Word History and Origins

Origin of formant¹

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

Example Sentences

Assistant coach Mike Formant turned to a videographer and said: “Record this. It may not go in, but it’ll be pretty.”

From Washington Post

Companies like Rocos and Formant have offered third-party control tools, and Boston Dynamics itself has also demonstrated software that it said would let potential Spot customers remotely test drive the robot around an assault course in its headquarters.

From The Verge

The District’s law “dramatically narrowed the options available to an interested buyer” of Mr. Formant’s land, Mr. Boasberg wrote: “He could no longer raze a property and start from scratch in order to unlock the value of a more profitable use.”

From Washington Post

John C. Formant owns the site of a full-service Shell station at a major intersection in Petworth, but he has been unable to carry out his plan to sell it for conversion to a residential-commercial project.

From Washington Post

Rejecting the city’s argument that Mr. Formant had not actually suffered any tangible harm, Mr. Boasberg noted that he credibly claimed that the reasonable expectations he had when he invested in the property were being thwarted.

From Washington Post