sound

Adjective

sound (comparative sounder, superlative soundest)

1. Healthy.

   He was safe and sound.

2. Complete, solid, or secure.

   Fred assured me the floorboards were sound.

3. (mathematics, logic) (argument, logical system) having the soundness property.
   • 1992, Rudolf M. Schuster, The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America: East of the Hundredth Meridian, volume V, page vii

     With fresh material, taxonomic conclusions are leavened by recognition that the material examined reflects the site it occupied; a herbarium packet gives one only a small fraction of the data desirable for sound conclusions. Herbarium material does not, indeed, allow one to extrapolate safely: what you see is what you get […]

4. (UK, slang) Good or a good thing.

   "How are you?" - "I'm sound."

   That's a sound track you're playing.

Derived terms

• safe and sound
• sound as a bell

• soundly

Sound is a travelling wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.

Sound

Sound is the vibration of matter, as perceived by the sense of hearing. Unwanted or annoying sound is often called noise.

Sourced

• Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
  • John Cage, "Communication", the third of the Composition as a Process lectures given in Darmstadt in 1958 and published in Silence. Many of Cage's works use sounds traditionally regarded as unmusical (radios not tuned to any particular station, for instance): he really did believe that the sound of a truck and the sounds made in a factory had just as much musical worth as the sounds made in a music school. There is also a suggestion expressed in the quote that in order to determine the artistic worth of something, it is necessary to examine the context in which it exists.

• A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.
  • John Cage (1955), quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.
  • Eduard Hanslick, quoted by Wolfgang Sandberger (1996) in the liner notes to the Juilliard String Quartet's Intimate Letters. Sony Classical SK 66840.

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Mon Sep 6 22:48:25 2010