Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes /ˈtoʊniːm/, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are extremely common in Africa, East Asia, and Central America, but rare elsewhere in Asia and in Europe; as many as seventy percent of world languages may be tonal.

In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages, tones are distinguished by their pitch level relative to each other, known as a register tone system. In multisyllable words, a single tone may be carried by the entire word rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often, grammatical information, such as past versus present, "I" versus "you", or positive versus negative, is conveyed solely by tone.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a word processor developed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS (1983), Apple Macintosh running Mac OS (1985), AT&T Unix PC (1985), Atari ST (1988), OS/2 (1989), Microsoft Windows (1989) and SCO Unix (1994). Commercial versions of Word are licensed as a standalone product or as a component of Microsoft Office, Windows RT or the discontinued Microsoft Works suite. Microsoft Word Viewer and Office Online are Freeware editions of Word with limited features.

History

Origins and growth

In 1981, Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi, the primary developer of Bravo, the first GUI word processor, which was developed at Xerox PARC. Simonyi started work on a word processor called Multi-Tool Word and soon hired Richard Brodie, a former Xerox intern, who became the primary software engineer.

Microsoft announced Multi-Tool Word for Xenix and MS-DOS in 1983. Its name was soon simplified to Microsoft Word. Free demonstration copies of the application were bundled with the November 1983 issue of PC World, making it the first to be distributed on-disk with a magazine. That year Microsoft demonstrated Word running on Windows.

String (computer science)

In computer programming, a string is traditionally a sequence of characters, either as a literal constant or as some kind of variable. The latter may allow its elements to be mutated and the length changed, or it may be fixed (after creation). A string is generally understood as a data type and is often implemented as an array of bytes (or words) that stores a sequence of elements, typically characters, using some character encoding. A string may also denote more general arrays or other sequence (or list) data types and structures.

Depending on programming language and precise data type used, a variable declared to be a string may either cause storage in memory to be statically allocated for a predetermined maximum length or employ dynamic allocation to allow it to hold variable number of elements.

When a string appears literally in source code, it is known as a string literal or an anonymous string.

In formal languages, which are used in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, a string is a finite sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set called an alphabet.

Word (disambiguation)

A word is a unit of language.

Word(s) may also refer to:

Computing

Lexicography

Mathematics

Media

Music

Record Labels

Albums

Tone (Jeff Ament album)

Tone is the debut solo album of American rock bassist and Pearl Jam-member Jeff Ament, released September 16, 2008 on Monkeywrench Records. 3,000 copies of the album were pressed and distributed through independent record stores across the United States, as well as through Pearl Jam's official website. The album has also been made available as a digital download via Pearl Jam's official website for US$4.99.

Background

The album contains ten songs written over a span of 12 years. It features a raw, experimental sound and was recorded by Ament over an eight-year period at Horseback Court in Blue Mountain, Montana, which is Ament's home studio, and completed in 2008.Tone was mixed by Brett Eliason, who had previously worked with Ament as Pearl Jam's sound engineer. Its cover art was created by Ament.

Former Three Fish drummer and frequent Ament collaborator Richard Stuverud contributed his drumming to seven songs on the album, and King's X frontman Doug Pinnick contributed lead vocals to the song "Doubting Thomasina". Pinnick would later in 2010 feature as the lead singer of another Ament/Stuverud project, "Tres Mts". "The Forest" was recorded by Pearl Jam; however, vocalist Eddie Vedder never got around to adding vocals to the track. The instrumental version by Pearl Jam is featured in the 2007 Pearl Jam concert film, Immagine in Cornice. The version of the song on Tone features vocals by Ament and music taken from the original demo version of the song.

Signal tone

A signal tone or signalling tone (or signaling tone) is a steady periodic sound (not necessarily a pure tone) used to indicate a condition, for example on a telephone line or as an audible warning.

In telephone systems, these tones are in-band indicators to subscribers, as opposed to in-band and out-of-band switching Signaling (telecommunications) tones. Typical major signal tones are dial tone, ringing tone, busy tone, and number unavailable tone. A loud stutter warning signal tone is used to alert subscribers of an engaged telephone circuit, warning that the other party has disconnected as a reminder to indicate the handset is not properly hung up.

Subscribers may choose to include additional vertical service code custom local area signaling services such as call forwarding which may indicate function by a stutter dial tone.

See also

References

Twelve-tone technique

Twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition devised by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and associated with the "Second Viennese School" composers, who were the primary users of the technique in the first decades of its existence. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any one note through the use of tone rows, orderings of the 12 pitch classes. All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key. Over time, the technique increased greatly in popularity and eventually became widely influential on 20th century composers. Many important composers who had originally not subscribed to or even actively opposed the technique eventually adopted it in their music, such as Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky.