Word: sonics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most Nicaraguans, however, remained calm. Despite the government's repeated alarms, residents of Managua made their way to work as usual on the city's overcrowded buses. Schoolchildren played outdoors, even gathering in clusters around the squat, forbidding tanks. Occasionally the civic mood was shattered by a sonic boom, which the government attributed to high-flying U.S. SR-71 spy planes violating Nicaraguan airspace. Despite the noisy interruptions, few Nicaraguans seemed concerned about the putative Yanqui invasion...
...been delivered. One reason, indicated by Shultz, was a Soviet assurance to the contrary. Another was the information gleaned from the rash of U.S. spy-plane flights, more probably low-flying F-4 reconnaissance jets than the superfast, supersophisticated SR-71s claimed by the Sandinistas (no sonic boom from an SR-71 can be heard when the aircraft flies, as it can on spy missions, at an altitude of 15 miles or more...
...Nicaraguan junta has been warning of an American invasion for more than two years. American muscle flexing and saber rattling gives them the best of both worlds, allowing the Sandinistas to capitalize on public fear of the Yankee threat without risking a war. And after a solid week of sonic booms over Managua-probably caused by American reconnaissance planets-the Sandinista are probably filling out the forms for a real batch of planes...
...synthesizer generates tones electronically. Older analog models employed a battery of oscillators, filters and amplifiers, both to produce and to alter the color of sound. Their newer digital cousins are to analogs what compact disc record players are to the ordinary turntable; they represent each point on the sonic spectrum with a series of numbers programmed into the machine. Synthesizers can go beyond standard intervals (the white and black keys of a piano) to register quarter tones and microtones. They can repeat complicated riffs with inhuman speed and accuracy, and approximate the sound of conventional instruments to the extent that...
...record technology had not changed much in principle since the Edison cylinder. On conventional LPs, called analog recordings, images of sound waves picked up by a microphone are traced into vinyl grooves; a kind of aural photograph is "developed" when a stylus retraces the grooves and re-creates the sonic vibrations. Digital recordings are akin to the computer-assisted cameras used in space, which translate images into a series of binary numbers that are later reassembled into pictures back on earth. In digital recording a computer takes 44,000 impressions of sound per sec. and assigns each a numerical value...