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/ˈoʊvərtˌoʊn/ Listen

Overtone

noun

(usually plural) an ulterior implicit meaning or quality.

A harmonic with a frequency that is a multiple of the fundamental frequency. Synonyms: partial, partial tone.

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"Overtone" Quotes from Famous Books

... acceptance of other tonal centres—distant a fifth from the main key-note—doubtless arose from their simplicity and naturalness, and was later sanctioned by acoustical law; the interval of a perfect fifth having one of the simplest ratios (2-3), and being familiar to people as the first overtone (after the octave) struck off by any sounding body—such as a bell or an organ pipe. The Venetian composers, notably Willaert, had also quite fully developed this principle of Tonic, Dominant and Subdominant harmony ...

— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... a faintly critical overtone to that. As she replied, Martha realized that she was ...

— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper

... was laboring and grunting at the grade, but five cars back the noise of the locomotive was lost. Yet there is a way to talk above the noise of a freight train just as there is a way to whistle into the teeth of a stiff wind. This freight-car talk is pitched just above the ordinary tone—it is an overtone of conversation, one might say—and it is distinctly nasal. The brakie could talk above the racket, and so, of course, could Lefty Joe. They sat about in the center of the train, on the forward end of one of the cars. No matter how the ...

— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand

... gazed she repeated his name, leisurely, quietly, and even more softly than before: "Mr. Spinrobin." But this time, as their eyes met and the syllables issued from her lips, he noticed that a singular after-sound—an exceedingly soft yet vibrant overtone—accompanied it. The syllables set something quivering within him, something that sang, running of its own accord into a melody to which his rising pulses beat ...

— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... automatic, so that the resonance-cavities shape themselves instantly to the note that is being produced within the larynx and, vibrating in sympathy with it, sound the overtones. The reciprocal principle of elective affinity between fundamental and overtone, between the shape assumed by the larynx for pitch and the shape assumed by the resonance-cavities for quality, is illustrated by the exciting influence of a sounding instrument upon a silent one tuned to the same pitch which, although not touched ...

— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller

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