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tonal
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
tonal
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ The exaggerated tonal contrasts Manet used added drama to his paintings.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ It's cleverer and more controllable than gamma correction and easier than struggling with brightness / contrast or tonal curves.
▪ Kingsbury a patterned tonal Wilton with a Venetian style in 10 colours.
▪ Little concerned to adopt the tonal idioms of opera for the sake of dramatic expression was Nicolas Bernier.
▪ Moreover, there are continuous advances in tonal and technical design and production.
▪ She spoke in an angry volume that shrank my male unit and climbed tonal scales like a steam-driven xylophone.
▪ The tonal range is extensive from just a few different grades.
▪ This gives better tonal contrast than any other pairing.
▪ Where I am sometimes less happy is in the tonal quality of the upper string playing.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
tonal

1776; from tone (n.) in the musical sense + -al (1), or from Medieval Latin tonalis.

Wiktionary
tonal

Etymology 1 a. 1 Of or relating to tones or tonality. 2 (context music English) Employing tones that have a predictable relationship to some tonic. 3 (context linguistics English) Employing differences in pitch (tones) to distinguish differences in the meaning of otherwise similar words (words which would otherwise be homophonic). Etymology 2

alt. (context in Mesoamerican mythology English) An animal companion which accompanies a person from birth to death. n. (context in Mesoamerican mythology English) An animal companion which accompanies a person from birth to death.

WordNet
tonal
  1. adj. employing variations in pitch to distinguish meanings of otherwise similar words; "Chinese is a tonal language" [syn: tonic]

  2. having tonality; i.e. tones and chords organized in relation to one tone such as a keynote or tonic [ant: atonal]

Wikipedia
Tonal

Tonal may refer to:

  • Tonal (mythology), a concept in the belief systems and traditions of Mesoamerican cultures, involving a spiritual link between a person and an animal
  • Tonal language, a type of language in which pitch is used to make phonemic distinctions
  • Tonality, a system of writing music involving the relationship of pitch to some centered key
  • Tonal system, a hexadecimal (base 16) system of notation, arithmetic, and metrology proposed by Nystrom in 1859
Tonal (mythology)

Tonal (To nal) is a concept within the study of Mesoamerican religion, myth, folklore and anthropology. It refers to the belief found in many indigenous Mesoamerican cultures that a person upon being born acquires a close spiritual link to an animal, a link that lasts throughout the lives of both creatures. It is in this way similar to the concept of Totem.

Usage examples of "tonal".

The chanting was picked up by others, and soon most of the people were deeply involved in a mesmerizing sequence that consisted of repetitive phrases sung in a pulsating beat with little change in tone, alternating with arrhythmic drumming that had more tonal variation than the voices.

It was originally composed to incorporate every known possibility of human language, all the sounds of all the various tongues, not to mention such refinements as inflection, tonal changes, proxemics and kinesics, as well.

With this as a measure he attempted to place the tones of the tetrachord, or Greek scale of four tones, which was the unit of their tonal system.

That had throbbed in the silent room with finality, a sound such as a programmatic composer, say Tchaikovsky, might have used as a tonal symbol for the breaking of a heart.

They are three: The vigor of the mental movement in general, its strength upon the imaginative and sentimental side, and the suggestion from the environment in the way of musical instruments of adequate tonal powers.

Neither in sonority nor in delicacy of tonal resource were the Egyptian instruments a tenth part as stimulating as those of to-day.

The ambiguity must be resolved by turning the ship and seeing which new two directions the tonal seems to be coming from, or correlating a narrowband towed array bearing to a broadband bearing.

SOUND SIGNATURE The collection of characteristic sounds, both broadband and narrowband tonals, that uniquely identify a class of ship, and sometimes, the exact ship itself.

TONAL SEARCH GATE A filter set up on a narrowband passive sonar that only listens to a small range of sound frequencies in anticipation of finding a particular TONAL.

She carefully ex- plained that there was no opposition, that my statement was correct, the tonal was also in everything.

When the table was filled, he ex- plained to them the difference between the tonal and the nagual, in the same terms he had explained it to me in a restau- rant in Mexico City, except that in their case his example was infinitely more graphic.

The chanting was picked up by others, and soon most of the people were deeply involved in a mesmerizing sequence that consisted of repetitive phrases sung in a pulsating beat with little change in tone, alternating with arrhythmic drumming that had more tonal variation than the voices.

He exulted in the pyrotechnical complexities of Berlioz and Wagner, the rich orchestrations of Brahms and Rachmaninoff, the lyricism of Dvorak and Mendelssohn, the tonal adventurism of Ravel and Debussy, and fused them into a style all his own.

I say that the tonal makes the world because it witnesses and assesses it according to tonal rules.

Three detailers were acting as judges, holding up scorecard numbers for volume, odor, and tonal quality.