vocalization, any sound produced through the action of an animal’s respiratory system and used in communication. Vocal sound, which is virtually limited to frogs, crocodilians and geckos, birds, and mammals, is sometimes the dominant form of communication. In many birds and nonhuman primates the

voice, in phonetics, the sound that is produced by the vibration of the vocal cords. All vowels are normally voiced, but consonants may be either voiced or voiceless (i.e., uttered without vibration of the vocal cords). The liquid consonant l and the nasal m, n, ng (as in “sing”) are normally

voice, in grammar, form of a verb indicating the relation between the participants in a narrated event (subject, object) and the event itself. Common distinctions of voice found in languages are those of active, passive, and middle voice. These distinctions may be made by inflection, as in Latin,

larynx, a hollow, tubular structure connected to the top of the windpipe (trachea); air passes through the larynx on its way to the lungs. The larynx also produces vocal sounds and prevents the passage of food and other foreign particles into the lower respiratory tracts. The larynx is composed of

loudspeaker: …frequently called the motor, or voice coil. The motor vibrates a diaphragm that in turn vibrates the air in immediate contact with it, producing a sound wave corresponding to the pattern of the original speech or music signal. Most frequently the motor consists of a coil of wire moving in…

speech disorder: Voice disorders: …the voice are described as dysphonia. Depending on the underlying cause, the various types of dysphonia are subdivided by the specifying adjective. Thus, a vocal disorder stemming from paralysis of the larynx is a paralytic dysphonia; injury (trauma) of the larynx may produce traumatic dysphonia; endocrine dysphonia reflects the voice…

voice identification, police technique for identifying individuals by the time, frequency, and intensity of their speech-sound waves. A sound spectrograph is employed to record these waves in the form of a graph that may be compared to graphs of other individuals and differentiated. Though voice

voice mail, Electronic system for recording oral messages sent by telephone. Typically, the caller hears a prerecorded message and then has an opportunity to leave a message in return. The person called can then retrieve the message at a later time by entering specific codes on his or her

Voice of America (VOA), radio broadcasting network of the U.S. government, a unit of the United States Information Agency (USIA). Its first broadcast, in German, took place on February 24, 1942, and was intended to counter Nazi propaganda among the German people. By the time World War II ended, the

Tajikistan: Literature: …lyric cycle Sadoyi Osiyo (1956; The Voice of Asia) won major communist awards. A number of female writers, notably the popular poet Gulrukhsor Safieva, circulated their work in newspapers, magazines, and Tajik-language collections.

Khushwant Singh: Literary works: …up Train to Pakistan with The Voice of God, and Other Stories (1957). Singh’s short stories follow a traditional plot-driven structure, and irony and comedic wit are the primary characteristics of his style. Most of his stories feature a colorful mix of characters who often display the fundamental mannerisms and…

O. Henry: Then in rapid succession came The Voice of the City (1908), The Gentle Grafter (1908), Roads of Destiny (1909), Options (1909), Strictly Business (1910), and Whirligigs (1910). Whirligigs contains perhaps Porter’s funniest story, “The Ransom of Red Chief.”

Ellen Glasgow: With The Voice of the People (1900) she began a series of novels depicting, with what she intended to be Zolaesque realism, the social and political history of Virginia since 1850. The series continued in The Battle-Ground (1902), The Deliverance (1904), The Romance of a Plain…

Irving Rapper: Heyday at Warner Brothers: The Voice of the Turtle, from John Van Druten’s play, was a rare romantic comedy for the director. Ronald Reagan was appealing as a soldier on leave, and Eleanor Parker played an actress who falls in love with him. Rapper’s contract with Warner Brothers expired,…

Mel Allen was an announcer and sportscaster who was a pioneer in both radio and television broadcasts of baseball games. Although Allen announced other sporting events, he is best known for his work in baseball. The owner of one of the most recognizable voices in radio, he was the play-by-play

VoIP, communications technology for carrying voice telephone traffic over a data network such as the Internet. VoIP uses the Internet Protocol (IP)—one half of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a global addressing system for sending and receiving packets of data over the

VoIP, communications technology for carrying voice telephone traffic over a data network such as the Internet. VoIP uses the Internet Protocol (IP)—one half of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a global addressing system for sending and receiving packets of data over the

dubbing, in filmmaking, the process of adding new dialogue or other sounds to the sound track of a motion picture that has already been shot. Dubbing is most familiar to audiences as a means of translating foreign-language films into the audience’s language. When a foreign language is dubbed, the

Denton Welch: …works have been published posthumously: A Voice Through a Cloud (1950), considered by many his best novel; Journals (1952), an account of his wide travels, taken despite his bad health; I Left My Grandfather’s House (1958), which is only a very rough draft; and Denton Welch—Selections from His Published Works…

telecommunication: Quantization: In digital transmission of voice, 256 levels are commonly used because tests have shown that this provides adequate fidelity for the average telephone listener.

musical variation: In Renaissance vocal music there were two principal variation techniques: contrapuntal variations following the stanzas of strophic chants; and sets of variations over a single, often quite lengthy, foundation voice in a mass or motet. In instrumental music a quite different sort of variation began to appear,…

Christina Aguilera: …on the television singing competition The Voice; she remained with the show until 2016. During this time Aguilera continued to act. Her notable TV credits included a guest role (2015) on Nashville. She also appeared in such films as Pitch Perfect 2 (2015) and Life of the Party (2018) and…

Edvard Munch: Paintings of love and death: Love’s awakening is shown in The Voice (1893), where on a summer night a girl standing among trees seems to be summoned more by an inner voice than by any sounds from a boat on the sea behind her. Compositionally, this is one of several paintings in the Frieze in…

Gabriel Okara: His first novel, The Voice (1964), is a remarkable linguistic experiment in which Okara translated directly from the Ijo (Ijaw) language, imposing Ijo syntax onto English in order to give literal expression to African ideas and imagery. The novel creates a symbolic landscape in which the forces of…

Val McCalla: …Jamaican-born British publisher who founded The Voice, an influential British newspaper focusing on black issues and interests.

police: Lie detectors: Voice-stress analyzers (VSAs), which became commercially available in the 1970s, rely on the detection of minute variations in the voice of the subject. Advocates of voice-stress analysis contend that inaudible vibrations in the voice, known as microtremors, speed up when a person is lying. During…

modem: Most modems are “voiceband”; i.e., they enable digital terminal equipment to communicate over telephone channels, which are designed around the narrow bandwidth requirements of the human voice. Cable modems, on the other hand, support the transmission of data over hybrid fibre-coaxial channels, which were originally designed to provide…

voice identification, police technique for identifying individuals by the time, frequency, and intensity of their speech-sound waves. A sound spectrograph is employed to record these waves in the form of a graph that may be compared to graphs of other individuals and differentiated. Though voice

voice identification, police technique for identifying individuals by the time, frequency, and intensity of their speech-sound waves. A sound spectrograph is employed to record these waves in the form of a graph that may be compared to graphs of other individuals and differentiated. Though voice

C.K. Stead: >Voices (1990), Straw into Gold: Poems New and Selected (1997), The Right Thing (2000), and The Red Tram (2004). Stead composed the poems in The Black River (2007) after suffering a stroke. The Yellow Buoy: Poems 2007–2012 (2013) deals largely with his European travels.

Frederic Prokosch: His final work, Voices (1983), was a memoir of his encounters with leading 20th-century literary figures, including T.S. Eliot and Thomas Mann, who were among his admirers.

Hugh MacLennan: His seventh novel, Voices in Time (1980), is the story of a man’s attempt to reconstruct the history of a Canada destroyed by nuclear holocaust.

André Malraux: Life: …his monumental meditation on art, Les Voix du Silence, which was published in 1951.

Bernice Johnson Reagon: …included a three-record collection called Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs, 1960–66 and the Wade in the Water series, a long-term project focusing on the history of African American sacred song and worship traditions. In 1989 Reagon received a MacArthur Foundation award. She was appointed distinguished…

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The Song of Hiawatha, Paul Revere’s Ride, and other poetry: In 1839 he published Voices of the Night, which contained the poems “Hymn to the Night,” “The Psalm of Life,” and “The Light of the Stars” and achieved immediate popularity. That same year Longfellow published Hyperion, a romantic novel idealizing his European travels. In 1842 his Ballads and Other…

Marjane Satrapi: From Embroideries and Chicken with Plums to Woman, Life, Freedom: …includes the English-language dark comedy The Voices (2014), which presents a man who, having failed to take his medication, becomes a murderer, and Radioactive (2019), a biopic about Marie Curie.

stringed instrument: The production of sound: …final process in piano manufacture: voicing. To voice a piano, a skilled worker adjusts the timbre of the instrument by the simple expedient of pricking the felt hammers with needles until a unified quality has been achieved throughout the range of the instrument. The tone of an instrument is also…

voice, in phonetics, the sound that is produced by the vibration of the vocal cords. All vowels are normally voiced, but consonants may be either voiced or voiceless (i.e., uttered without vibration of the vocal cords). The liquid consonant l and the nasal m, n, ng (as in “sing”) are normally

Democritus: …asserted that space, or the Void, had an equal right with reality, or Being, to be considered existent. He conceived of the Void as a vacuum, an infinite space in which moved an infinite number of atoms that made up Being (i.e., the physical world). These atoms are eternal and…

emptiness, in mysticism and religion, a state of “pure consciousness” in which the mind has been emptied of all particular objects and images; also, the undifferentiated reality (a world without distinctions and multiplicity) or quality of reality that the emptied mind reflects or manifests. The

Anish Kapoor: …Venice Biennale with his installation Void Field, a grid of rough sandstone blocks, each with a mysterious black hole penetrating its top surface. The following year he was honoured with the Turner Prize, a prestigious award for contemporary art. Kapoor continued to explore the idea of the void during the…

formal logic: Set theory: …same, there is only one null class, which is therefore usually called the null class (or sometimes the empty class); it is symbolized by Λ or ø. The notation x = y is used for “x is identical with y,” and ∼(x = y) is usually abbreviated as x ≠…

Georges Perec: Perec’s novel La Disparition (1969; A Void) was written entirely without using the letter e, as was its translation. A companion piece of sorts appeared in 1972 with the novella Les Revenentes (“The Ghosts”; published in English as The Exeter Text [1996]), in which every word has only e as…

André Malraux: Literary works: La Voie royale (1930) is a thriller set among the Khmer temples of Cambodia that Malraux himself explored. Malraux’s masterpiece is La Condition humaine (1933), which made him known to readers all over the world. This novel is set in Shanghai during the crushing by…

Paris: The Triumphal Way: Northwest from the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel (Carrousel Triumphal Arch), located in the courtyard between the open arms of the Louvre, extends one of the most remarkable perspectives to be seen in any modern city. It is sometimes called la Voie Triomphale…

Angelina Jolie is an American actress and director known for her sex appeal and edginess as well as for her humanitarian work. She won an Academy Award for her supporting role as a mental patient in Girl, Interrupted (1999). Jolie, daughter of actor Jon Voight, spent much of her childhood in New

ship: Early examples: …1788 Fitch and his partner, Henry Voight, had made repeated trips on the Delaware River as far as Burlington, 20 miles above Philadelphia, the longest passage then accomplished by a steamboat.

Jon Voight is an American actor who achieved stardom with his portrayal of the street hustler Joe Buck in the groundbreaking film Midnight Cowboy (1969) and went on to have a successful career taking on challenging leading and character roles in a wide range of movies and television shows. Voight

Jon Voight is an American actor who achieved stardom with his portrayal of the street hustler Joe Buck in the groundbreaking film Midnight Cowboy (1969) and went on to have a successful career taking on challenging leading and character roles in a wide range of movies and television shows. Voight

history of photography: Development of the daguerreotype: …same period, József Petzval and Friedrich Voigtländer, both of Vienna, worked on better lens and camera design. Petzval produced an achromatic portrait lens that was about 20 times faster than the simple meniscus lens the Parisian opticians Charles Chevalier and N.M.P. Lerebours had made for Daguerre’s cameras. Meanwhile, Voigtländer reduced…

electronic music: Establishment of electronic studios: …One Man Only) and Henry’s Orphée (1953), a ballet score written for the Belgian dancer Maurice Béjart. These and similar works created a sensation when first presented to the public. Symphonie pour un homme seul, a descriptive suite about man and his activities, is an extended composition in 11 movements.…

Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was a French army officer, a major figure in the Dreyfus case. Esterhazy had posed as a count and served in the Austrian army during the 1866 war with Prussia. He then served in the French Foreign Legion before being commissioned in the regular French army (1892). Having

harmony: Dissonance after Wagner: , “Voiles” (“Sails”), from the first book of preludes for piano—can be said to exist without harmonic resolution and, therefore, without traditional tonality. Other Debussian devices include the regarding of the seventh chord (e.g., dominant seventh, diminished seventh) as a self-sufficient harmony instead of as a…

Little Brothers of Jesus and Little Sisters of Jesus: …were founded in 1933 by René Voillaume in southern Oran, Alg.; the Little Sisters were founded in September 1939 at Touggourt, Alg., by Sister Madeleine of Jesus. Both congregations live in small groups, called fraternities, in ordinary dwellings among the poor labouring classes. They hold the same type of jobs…

Rob Portman: George Voinovich announced in 2009 that he would not seek reelection, Portman sought the seat and received the backing of several Tea Party groups as well as the state’s Republican establishment. Greatly outspending his opponents, Portman won nearly 57 percent of the vote in the…

Vladimir Voinovich was a Russian writer and dissident known for his irreverent and perceptive satire that often ran afoul of Soviet authorities. Voinovich’s father was a journalist who spent several years in a forced-labour camp, and his mother was a teacher. Vladimir served in the Soviet army from

Vladimir Voinovich was a Russian writer and dissident known for his irreverent and perceptive satire that often ran afoul of Soviet authorities. Voinovich’s father was a journalist who spent several years in a forced-labour camp, and his mother was a teacher. Vladimir served in the Soviet army from

Boeotia, district of ancient Greece with a distinctive military, artistic, and political history. It corresponds somewhat to the modern perifereiakí enótita (regional unit) of Boeotia, Central Greece (Modern Greek: Stereá Elláda) periféreia (region), northern Greece. The regional unit extends

VoIP, communications technology for carrying voice telephone traffic over a data network such as the Internet. VoIP uses the Internet Protocol (IP)—one half of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a global addressing system for sending and receiving packets of data over the

voir dire, in law, process of questioning by which members of a jury are selected from a large panel, or venire, of prospective jurors. The veniremen are questioned by the judge or by the attorneys for the respective parties. The voir dire attempts to detect bias or preconceived notions of guilt or

Guillaume de Machaut: …among the longer works is Voir-Dit, which relates how a young girl of high rank falls in love with the poet because of his fame and creative accomplishments. The difference in age is too great, however, and the idyll ends in disappointment. Machaut’s lyric poems also are based on the…

Erasmus: The wandering scholar: …Erasmus met the fiery preacher Jean Voirier, who, though a Franciscan, told him that “monasticism was a life more of fatuous men than of religious men.” Admirers recounted how Voirier’s disciples faced death serenely, trusting in God, without the solemn reassurance of the last rites. Voirier lent Erasmus a copy…

bomber: …aircraft such as the French Voisin, which carried some 130 pounds (60 kg) of small bombs that the observer simply picked up and dropped over the side.

automobile: The age of the classic cars: Hotchkiss, Talbot (Darracq), and Voisin of France; the Duesenberg, Cadillac, Packard, and Pierce-Arrow of the United States; the Horch, Maybach, and Mercedes-Benz of Germany; the Belgian Minerva; and the Italian

Gabriel Voisin was a French aviation pioneer and aircraft manufacturer. Voisin was one of the most colorful figures in the early history of aviation. Trained as an architect and inspired by the work of the French aviation pioneer Clément Ader, he began to pursue an interest in flight as early as

Affair of the Poisons: …to death, including the poisoner La Voisin (Catherine Deshayes, Madame Monvoisin), who was burned on Feb. 22, 1680.

Voisin-Farman I, aircraft built by the French aeronautical pioneer Gabriel Voisin for the French aviator Henri Farman in 1907. (Read Orville Wright’s 1929 biography of his brother, Wilbur.) Like the Wright brothers’ aircraft, the earliest powered Voisin airplanes were pusher biplanes with elevators

Carl von Voit was a German physiologist whose definitive measurements of gross metabolism in mammals, including humans, helped establish the study of the physiology of metabolism and laid much of the foundation for modern nutritional science. A pupil of the German chemists Justus von Liebig and

Vincent Voiture was a French poet, letter writer, and animating spirit of the group that gathered at the salon of the marquise de Rambouillet. Voiture completed his education in Paris and early made the acquaintance of the aged poet François de Malherbe and of Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, whose zeal

Romania: Romanians and Hungarians: …overwhelmed the Slavic-Romanian duchies, or voivodates, that they encountered there. In the 11th century they made the territory north of the Carpathians, which was to become known as Transylvania, a part of the Hungarian kingdom. To the south a number of small voivodates coalesced by 1330 into the independent Romanian…

Roma: These chieftains (voivodes) are elected for life from among outstanding families of the group, and the office is not heritable. Their power and authority vary according to the size of the band, its traditions, and its relationships with other bands within a confederation.

keyboard instrument: Italy: …forerunner of the similarly constructed voix céleste stop popular in the 19th-century romantic organ. The scale of the classic Italian principale was not much different from its counterpart in the north, but its mouth was narrower, its voicing more delicate, and there was a notable lack of chiff. Reeds were…

Louis-Honoré Fréchette: There, he wrote La Voix d’un exilé (1866–68; “The Voice of an Exile”), a poem attacking the political and clerical dealings in Quebec in that period of Canadian confederation and voicing a patriotic idealization of the French republic. Returning to Lévis in 1871, Fréchette entered politics, representing that…

André Malraux: Life: …his monumental meditation on art, Les Voix du Silence, which was published in 1951.

opera: Later opera in France: The monodrama, La Voix humaine (1959; “The Human Voice,” text by Jean Cocteau), has as its only visible character a distraught young woman conversing by telephone with her lover. Poulenc’s only large serious opera, Dialogues des Carmélites (1957; “Dialogues of the Carmelites,” libretto by Georges Bernanos), employs…

Victor Hugo: Success (1830–51): …Songs of Twilight), overtly political; Les Voix intérieures (1837; “Inner Voices”), both personal and philosophical; and Les Rayons et les ombres (1840; “Sunlight and Shadows”), in which the poet, renewing these different themes, indulges his gift for colour and picturesque detail. But Hugo was not content merely to express personal…

air de cour, genre of French solo or part-song predominant from the late 16th century through the 17th century. It originated in arrangements, for voice and lute, of popular chansons (secular part-songs) written in a light chordal style. Such arrangements were originally known as vau- (or voix-)

Serbia: The disintegration of Ottoman rule: (The South Slav translation, Vojna Krajina, was used 300 years later in the name given to the areas of Croatia that local Serb majorities attempted to disconnect from Croatia following its secession from Yugoslavia.) Also dating from the time of the great migration of 1691 was the gradual conversion…

St. Adalbert ; canonized 999; feast day, April 23) was the first bishop of Prague to be of Czech origin. Descended from the Slavník princes of Bohemia, he was trained in theology at Magdeburg (Germany). At his confirmation he received his name from St. Adalbert, first archbishop of Magdeburg.

Vojvodina, autonomous province in Serbia. It is the northernmost part of Serbia, bordered by Croatia to the west, Hungary to the north, and Romania to the east. Vojvodina includes the historic regions of Bačka, between the Danube and Tisa rivers and the Hungarian border; Banat, to the east of

playa: Physical characteristics: …pans in South Africa, called vokils, are of this type.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: …novel, Vol de nuit (1931; Night Flight), was dedicated to the glory of the first airline pilots and their mystical exaltation as they faced death in the rigorous performance of their duty. His own flying adventures are recorded in Terre des hommes (1939; Wind, Sand and Stars). He used his…

Harold Rosen: Straubel cofounded Volacom, Inc., which sought to develop an unmanned aerial vehicle that would be a communications platform. In 2007 he founded the Southern California Selene Group, one of the teams competing for the Google Lunar X Prize to build the first private lunar rover, but the…

juego de los voladores, (Spanish: “game of the fliers”), ritual dance of Mexico, possibly originating among the pre-Columbian Totonac and Huastec Indians of the region now occupied by Veracruz and Puebla states, where it is still danced. Although the costumes and music show Spanish influence, the

Volans, constellation in the southern sky at about 8 hours right ascension and 70° south in declination. Its brightest star is Beta Volantis, with a magnitude of 3.8. This constellation was invented by Pieter Dircksz Keyser, a navigator who joined the first Dutch expedition to the East Indies in

volante, Spanish one- or two-passenger carriage, having two wheels and an open, hooded body. The body was set in front of the wheels and attached to the long shafts. The carriage was usually pulled by one horse, which was ridden by the coachman, although two or three horses were also used. Volantes

bullfighting: The rise of professional bullfighting: …method of killing the bull—the volapié, in which the bull is transfixed by the cape held low to the ground while the bullfighter lunges forward (as the bull charges) and with the right hand plunges the sword between the bull’s shoulder blades. Costillares’s rival was Pedro Romero of Ronda in…

Volapük, artificial language constructed in 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a German cleric, and intended for use as an international second language. Although its vocabulary is based on English and the Romance languages, the word roots in Volapük have been modified to such a degree that they are

Volterra, town and episcopal see, Toscana (Tuscany) regione, central Italy, northwest of Siena. As the ancient Velathri it was one of the 12 cities of the Etruscan confederation. It supported Rome during the Second Punic War in 205 bc, acquired Roman citizenship after the civil wars between Gaius

coal utilization: Combustion reactions: …two stages: (1) evolution of volatile matter during the initial stages of heating, with accompanying physical and chemical changes, and (2) subsequent combustion of the residual char. Following ignition and combustion of the evolving volatile matter, oxygen diffuses to the surface of the particle and ignites the char. In some…

essential oil, highly volatile substance isolated by a physical process from an odoriferous plant of a single botanical species. The oil bears the name of the plant from which it is derived; for example, rose oil or peppermint oil. Such oils were called essential because they were thought to

air pollution: Air toxics: Many are volatile organic compounds (VOCs), organic compounds that readily evaporate. VOCs include pure hydrocarbons, partially oxidized hydrocarbons, and organic compounds containing chlorine, sulfur, or nitrogen. They are widely used as fuels (e.g., propane and gasoline), as paint thinners and solvents, and in

gasoline engine: Fuel: …properties of gasoline are its volatility and antiknock quality. Volatility is a measure of the ease of vaporization of gasoline, which is adjusted in the production process to account for seasonal and altitude variations in the local market. Properly formulated gasoline helps engines to start in cold weather and to…

Volatility is a measure of the frequency and magnitude of changes in the price of a stock, exchange-traded fund (ETF), cryptocurrency, or other security. The larger and more frequent the price changes, the more volatile the underlying security. Volatility is of particular importance in the world of

In the world of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), there’s one (or more) for pretty much any sector, industry, subgroup, or strategy you can think of. But just because there’s an ETF for every situation doesn’t mean there’s something suitable for every buyer. Case in point: volatility index ETFs.

vaporization, conversion of a substance from the liquid or solid phase into the gaseous (vapour) phase. If conditions allow the formation of vapour bubbles within a liquid, the vaporization process is called boiling. Direct conversion from solid to vapour is called sublimation. Heat must be

Volcae, in ancient Gaul, a Celtic tribe divided into two sections: the Tectosages, of the valley of the upper Garonne River around Tolosa (Toulouse), and the Arecomici, of the right bank of the Rhône River with their centre at Nemausus (Nîmes). Both areas were included in the Roman province of

Misti Volcano, volcano of the Andes mountains of southern Peru. It is flanked by Chachani and Pichupichu volcanoes and rises to 19,098 feet (5,821 meters) above sea level, towering over the city of Arequipa. Its perfect, snowcapped cone is thought to have had religious significance for the Incas

Irazú Volcano, active volcano, in the Cordillera Central, east-central Costa Rica. Its name originates from the indigenous word for “thunder.” The highest mountain in the Cordillera Central, Irazú reaches an elevation of 11,260 feet (3,432 metres). It is a popular ascent for tourists, as its cone

Izalco Volcano, volcano in western El Salvador on the southern slope of Santa Ana. It is the most active volcano in Central America, having erupted more than 50 times since 1770. Its black symmetrical cone, which was formed by a number of eruptions over a period of 200 years, is devoid of