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for•mant

Pronunciation: (fôr'munt), [key]
—n.
1. Music.the range and number of partials present in a tone of a specific instrument, representing its timbre.
2. Acoustic Phonet.one of the regions of concentration of energy, prominent on a sound spectrogram, that collectively constitute the frequency spectrum of a speech sound. The relative positioning of the first and second formants, whether periodic or aperiodic, as of the o of hope at approximately 500 and 900 cycles per second, is usually sufficient to distinguish a sound from all others.

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