Word: sonically
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...through to home playback. This means two microphones to "hear" the performance, two systems of groovings on the same record (or double-track tape), a double-pronged tone arm, two amplifiers and two speakers. Each circuit carries the same music, but the music is caught in slightly different sonic "perspectives." In a recording of a symphony, for example, the violins will be slightly stronger in the left speaker, the brasses stronger in the right. A listener sitting between should hear approximately what he hears from the best seats at a concert...
Museum of Modern Art, still another kind of composition for tape recorder was unwound: Low Speed, Invention and Fantasy in Space by Otto Luening and Sonic Contours by Vladimir Ussachevsky. Out of the loudspeaker came the sound of a flute-but a flute that could growl like a bassoon, or thunder like the trump of doom, as well as chirp like a bird-and the sound of a piano that seemed to accompany itself with organ tones. Haunting both instruments was a maze of echoes and pulsing overtones...
...Geoffrey de Havilland may have passed Mach i in 1946, but his plane went to pieces and he was killed (TIME, Oct. 7, 1946). The first man to break through the sonic wall in level flight: the U.S. Air Force's Captain "Chuck" Yeager, on Oct. 14, 1947, in his rocket-powered Xi. *A wing whose thickness is small compared with its breadth from leading edge to trailing edge is "thin" aerodynamically, though its actual thickness may be large...
Only a few years ago, designers thought that at the speed of sound, turbulent shock waves would pound a plane to bits. But when jets pushed aircraft up to the sonic barrier, it turned out to be nothing worse than a bump in the road. Plane after plane passed over into the exhilarating calm of supersonic flight. In the current issue of Skyline magazine, Vice President Ray Rice of North American Aviation, Inc. explains why the thermal barrier can only be pushed ahead, never completely overcome...
...designers and test pilots pushed their planes up toward the speed of sound, the danger they feared most was the beating they took in the "transsonic zone." When an airplane is moving close to sonic speed, shock waves'(powerful sound waves) form on its wings and control surfaces. They come and go, shift irregularly and sometimes exert enormous forces on the plane's structure. Many early airplanes that trespassed too far into the transsonic range were destroyed by galloping shock waves. The remedy is now understood: thinner wings and tail surfaces, and a quick passage through the danger...