voicing

Pluralvoicings (some meanings)

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of voice.

   Critics are voicing doubts about the new policy.

   Voicing his frustration openly, he stormed out of the room.

   Note

   The -ing form does double duty. In a progressive it is a verb (critics are voicing doubts), and as a gerund it fills a noun slot (voicing concerns early saves trouble). In both roles it keeps the verb's direct object. The verb's craft meaning, "to regulate the tone of," lies behind the organ builder's noun. That noun, unlike the gerund, takes an article and a plural: a voicing, voicings.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The process by which the vocal cords vibrate while a speech sound is produced.

   Voicing is what separates the consonant in 'zip' from the one in 'sip'.

   During voicing, air from the lungs sets the vocal cords vibrating.

   Similarphonation

   Note

   The phonetician's sense, rooted in what the larynx physically does. Its companion adjectives are voiced and voiceless. Two neighboring senses build on it. The classification of sounds sorts consonants by this behavior. The sound change produces it where it was absent. When a linguist writes about voicing, the context usually shows which of the three is meant: the vibration, the category or the change.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A specific arrangement of the notes that make up a chord.

   She chose an open voicing to give the chord more space.

   Jazz pianists favor rich voicings that stack notes in unusual ways.

   Note

   Here the word belongs to the player or arranger. A chord keeps its identity while its notes are reordered, spread out or stacked differently, and each such layout is a voicing. It is freely countable and plural, and it pairs naturally with adjectives describing spacing, as in an open voicing. Musicians speak of voicing a chord as a deliberate choice of sound, not a change of harmony.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A sound produced by the voice; a vocalization.

   The actor's clear voicing carried to the back of the hall.

   A faint voicing of approval rose from the crowd.

   Similarvocalization, utterance, expression

   Note

   The everyday, nontechnical sense, close to vocalization and used of any creature. Valentine Brown's Poems (1900) hears the "shrill voicings of seagulls." The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders (1990) describes a singer's "high-pitched voicings." Both use the plural with a describing adjective, a pattern worth following. A bare singular voicing can easily be read as the phonetic term.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   A way of classing speech sounds according to whether they typically involve vibration of the vocal cords.

   Voicing divides consonants into those made with vocal cord vibration and those without.

   Linguists rely on voicing to group sounds such as 'g', 'd', and 'b' together.

   Note

   Phonology turns the vibration into a label that divides consonants into voiced and voiceless classes. Note the hedge "tend to be associated": membership in the voiced class is a matter of category, not measurement. A sound filed as voiced need not show strong vocal-cord vibration every time it is spoken. The word here names a contrast in the sound system rather than an event in the throat.

6. 6
   noununcountable

   A phonological change by which a voiceless consonant or other sound comes to be pronounced as voiced.

   Voicing converts the voiceless consonant between vowels into a voiced sound in many dialects.

   Intervocalic voicing affects consonants that sit between two vowels.

   Similarsonorization

   Oppositedevoicing

   Note

   The sound-change meaning, in which a voiceless consonant becomes voiced, usually under the influence of its surroundings. Linguists typically name the setting along with the process, as in intervocalic voicing. Its learned synonym is sonorization. Its opposites are devoicing and the Latinate surdization. Unlike the other phonetic senses, it describes something that happens to a sound, so it often appears as a rule or a change.

7. 7
   noununcountable

   The last stage of fine-tuning the pitch and tonal quality of a sound-producing device, above all an organ or comparable instrument.

   The final voicing of the organ took the craftsman several weeks.

   Careful voicing balanced the volume and color across all the pipes.

   Note

   An organ builder's term for the finishing work: each pipe or string is adjusted for pitch, loudness and timbre so the whole instrument speaks evenly in its room. It works both as a mass noun (careful voicing) and as a count noun (a bright voicing). The same word names how a chord's notes are spaced, so a builder's voicing finishes an instrument, while a pianist's voicing is a choice of notes.

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