Word: sonics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...could (if permitted), Von Braun claims, tell about tested methods of overcoming the obstacles pointed out by his opponents. He is sure that many "terrors of space" will evaporate like the "sonic barrier," which once was thought to limit the speed of airplanes...
...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...
...flight when he lands on the ground; the camera tilting crazily, as if it were careering through the sky, while focused on Tycoon Richardson shakily listening in his office to a radio report of a crucial test. Through the picture, like a macabre musical motif, runs a sonic soundtrack: great swooping wooshes, the piercing wail of the Vickers Supermarine 535 Swift as it dives from 40,000-ft. heights toward the buffeting, invisible barrier of sound...
...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...