What is "chord"

Chord \Chord\, v. i. (Mus.) To accord; to harmonize together; as, this note chords with that. [1913 Webster] ||

Chord \Chord\ (k[^o]rd), n. [L chorda a gut, a string made of a gut, Gr. chordh`. In the sense of a string or small rope, in general, it is written cord. See Cord.]

1. The string of a musical instrument.
   --Milton.

2. (Mus.) A combination of tones simultaneously performed, producing more or less perfect harmony, as, the common chord.

3. (Geom.) A right line uniting the extremities of the arc of a circle or curve.

4. (Anat.) A cord. See Cord, n., 4.

5. (Engin.) The upper or lower part of a truss, usually horizontal, resisting compression or tension.
   --Waddell.

   Accidental, Common, & Vocal chords. See under Accidental, Common, and Vocal.

   Chord of an arch. See Illust. of Arch.

   Chord of curvature, a chord drawn from any point of a curve, in the circle of curvature for that point.

   Scale of chords. See Scale.

Chord \Chord\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Chorded; p. pr. & vb. n. Chording.] To provide with musical chords or strings; to string; to tune.

When Jubal struck the chorded shell.
--Dryden.

Even the solitary old pine tree chords his harp.
--Beecher.

"related notes in music," 1590s, ultimately a shortening of accord (or borrowed from a similar development in French) and influenced by Latin chorda "catgut, a string" of a musical instrument (see cord (n.)). Spelling with an -h- first recorded c.1600, from confusion with chord (n.2). Originally two notes; of three or more from 18c.

"structure in animals resembling a string," 1540s, alteration of cord (n.), by influence of Greek khorde "gut-string, string of a lyre, tripe," from PIE *ghere- "gut, entrail" (see yarn). The geometry sense is from 1550s; meaning "feeling, emotion" first attested 1784.

n. 1 (senseid en music)(context music English) A harmonic set of three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. 2 (context geometry English) A straight line between two points of a curve. 3 (context engineering English) A horizontal member of a truss. 4 (context aeronautics English) The distance between the leading edge and trailing edge of a wing, measured in the direction of the normal airflow. 5 (context computing English) A keyboard shortcut that involves two or more distinct keypresses, such as Ctrl+M followed by P. 6 The string of a musical instrument. 7 (context anatomy English) A cord. 8 (cx graph theory English) An edge that is not part of a cycle but connects two vertex of the cycle. vb. 1 (context transitive English) To write chords for. 2 (context music English) To accord; to harmonize together. 3 (context transitive English) To provide with musical chords or strings; to string; to tune.

1. n. a straight line connecting two points on a curve

2. a combination of three or more notes that blend harmoniously when sounded together

1. v. play chords on (a string instrument)

2. bring into consonance, harmony, or accord while making music or singing [syn: harmonize, harmonise]

Chord may refer to:

• Chord (music), an aggregate of musical pitches sounded simultaneously
  • Chord (guitar) a chord played on a guitar, which has a particular tuning
• Chord (geometry), a line segment joining two points on a curve
• Chord (astronomy), a line crossing a foreground astronomical object during an occultation which gives an indication of the objects size and/or shape
• Chord (graph theory), an edge joining two not-adjacent nodes in a cycle
• Chord (truss construction), an outside member of a truss, as opposed to the inner "webbed members"
• Chord (aeronautics), the distance between the front and back of a wing, measured in the direction of the normal airflow. The term chord was selected due to the curved nature of the wing's surface
• Chord (peer-to-peer), a peer-to-peer protocol and algorithm for distributed hash tables (DHT)
• Chord (concurrency), a concurrency construct in some object-oriented programming languages
• Chord (comics), a comic book character who is the former mentor of the New Warriors
• Chord (software), free software useful for creating staffless lead sheets
• Chord Overstreet, American actor and musician

Chord may also refer to:

• Mouse chording or a chorded keyboard, where multiple buttons are held down simultaneously to produce a specific action

The Chords may refer to:

• The Chords, 1970s British mod revival band
• The Chords (U.S.), 1950s American doo wop group

Chords may refer to:

• Chords (artist), a Swedish hiphop/reggae artist

A chord of a circle is a straight line segment whose endpoints both lie on the circle. A secant line, or just secant, is the infinite line extension of a chord. More generally, a chord is a line segment joining two points on any curve, for instance an ellipse. A chord that passes through a circle's center point is the circle's diameter.

The word chord is from the Latin chorda meaning bowstring.

A chord is a concurrency construct available in Polyphonic C♯ and Cω inspired by the join pattern of the join-calculus. A chord is a function body that is associated with multiple function headers and cannot execute until all function headers are called.

Chord is software for creating staffless lead sheets (also known as chord charts) in PostScript format. Chord was developed by Martin Leclerc and Mario Dorion. This project has been inactive for several years. It was forked in 2007 to a project called Chordii (pronounced as chord-ee-ee)1.

In aeronautics, chord refers to the imaginary straight line joining the leading and trailing edges of an aerofoil. The chord length is the distance between the trailing edge and the point on the leading edge where the chord intersects the leading edge.

The point on the leading edge that is used to define the chord can be defined as either the surface point of minimum radius, or the surface point that will yield maximum chord length.

The wing, horizontal stabilizer, vertical stabilizer and propeller of an aircraft are all based on aerofoil sections, and the term chord or chord length is also used to describe their width. The chord of a wing, stabilizer and propeller is determined by measuring the distance between leading and trailing edges in the direction of the airflow. (If a wing has a rectangular planform, rather than tapered or swept, then the chord is simply the width of the wing measured in the direction of airflow.) The term chord is also applied to the width of wing flaps, ailerons and rudder on an aircraft.

The term is also applied to aerofoils in gas turbine engines such as turbojet, turboprop, or turbofan engines for aircraft propulsion.

Most wings are not rectangular so they have a different chord at different positions along their span. To give a characteristic figure that can be compared among various wing shapes, the mean aerodynamic chord, or MAC, is used. The MAC is somewhat more complex to calculate, because most wings vary in chord over the span, growing narrower towards the outer tips. This means that more lift is generated on the wider inner portions, and the MAC moves the point to measure the chord to take this into account.

In computing, Chord is a protocol and algorithm for a peer-to-peer distributed hash table. A distributed hash table stores key-value pairs by assigning keys to different computers (known as "nodes"); a node will store the values for all the keys for which it is responsible. Chord specifies how keys are assigned to nodes, and how a node can discover the value for a given key by first locating the node responsible for that key.

Chord is one of the four original distributed hash table protocols, along with CAN, Tapestry, and Pastry. It was introduced in 2001 by Ion Stoica, Robert Morris, David Karger, Frans Kaashoek, and Hari Balakrishnan, and was developed at MIT.

In the field of astronomy the term chord typically refers to a line crossing an object which is formed during an occultation event. By taking accurate measurements of the start and end times of the event, in conjunction with the known location of the observer and the object's orbit, the length of the chord can be determined giving an indication of the size of the occulting object. By combining observations made from several different locations, multiple chords crossing the occulting object can be determined giving a more accurate shape and size model. This technique of using multiple observers during the same event has been used to derive more sophisticated shape models for asteroids, whose shape can be highly irregular. A notable example of this occurred in 2002 when the asteroid 345 Tercidina underwent a stellar occultation of a very bright star as seen from Europe. During this event a team of at least 105 observers recorded 75 chords across the asteroid's surface allowing for a very accurate size and shape determination.

In addition to using a known orbit to determine an objects size, the reverse process can also be used. In this usage the occulting object's size is taken to be known and the occultation time can be used to determine the length of the chord the background object traced across the foreground object. Knowing this chord and the foreground object's size, a more precise orbit for the object can be determined.

This usage of the term "chord" is similar to the geometric concept (see: Chord (geometry)). The difference being that in the geometric sense a chord refers to a line segment whose ends lie on a circle, whereas in the astronomical sense the occulting shape is not necessarily circular.

A chord, in music, is any harmonic set of usually three or more notes (also called "pitches") that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. In everyday use by musical ensembles such as bands and orchestras, the three or more notes of a chord are often sounded together. However, the notes of a chord do not have to be played together at the same time: arpeggios and broken chords (these involve the notes of the chord played one after the other, rather than at the same time) may, for many practical and theoretical purposes, also constitute chords. Chords and sequences of chords are frequently used in modern West African, Oceanian and Western classical music and Western popular music, whereas they are absent from the music of many other parts of the world. In tonal Western classical music (music with a tonic key or "home key"), the most frequently encountered chords are triads, so called because they consist of three distinct notes: the root note, a third above the root note and a fifth interval above the root note. Further notes may be added to give tetrads such as seventh chords, of which the most commonly encountered example being the dominant seventh chord, which consists of a root note, the major third, the perfect fifth, and the minor seventh above the root.

Other chords with more than three notes include added tone chords, extended chords and tone clusters, which are used in contemporary classical music, jazz and other genres. Triads commonly found in the Western classical tradition are major and minor chords, with augmented and diminished chords appearing less often. The descriptions major, minor, augmented, and diminished are referred to collectively as chordal quality. Chords are also commonly classified by their root note—for instance, a C major triad consists of the pitch classes C, E, and G. A chord retains its identity if the notes are stacked in a different way vertically; however, if a chord has a note other than the root note as the lowest note, the chord is said to be in an inversion (this is also called an "inverted chord"). While most chords have at least three notes, power chords, which are widely used in rock music, particularly in hard rock and heavy metal music, have just two notes: the root and the fifth (although the root may be doubled with the octave above).

An ordered series of chords is called a chord progression. One example of a widely used chord progression in Western traditional music and blues is the 12 bar blues progression, the simplest versions of which include tonic, subdominant and dominant chords (this system of naming chords is described later in this section). Although any chord may in principle be followed by any other chord, certain patterns of chords are more common in Western music, and some pattern have been accepted as establishing the key ( tonic note) in common-practice harmony–notably the movement between tonic and dominant chords. To describe this, Western music theory has developed the practice of numbering chords using Roman numerals which represent the number of diatonic steps up from the tonic note of the scale.

Common ways of notating or representing chords in Western music other than conventional staff notation include Roman numerals, figured bass, macro symbols (sometimes used in modern musicology), and chord charts. Each of these systems is more likely to appear in certain contexts: figured bass notation was used prominently in notation of Baroque music, macro symbols are used in modern musicology, and chord charts are typically found in the lead sheets used in popular music and jazz. The chords in a song or piece are also given names which refer to their function. The chord built on the first note of a major scale is called the tonic chord (colloquially called a "I" or "one" chord). The chord built on the fourth note of a major scale is called the subdominant chord (colloquially called a "IV" chord or "four" chord). The chord built on the fifth degree of the major scale is called the dominant chord (colloquially called a "V chord" or "five" chord). There are names for the chords built on every note of the major scale. Chords can be played on many instruments, including piano, pipe organ, guitar and mandolin. Chords can also be performed when multiple musicians play together in a musical ensemble or when multiple singers sing in a choir and they play or sing three or more notes at the same time.