aftersound

aftersound

English

Etymology

after- +‎ sound

Noun

aftersound (plural aftersounds)

1. A sound that persists or remains audible after its source has ceased to produce it; the perception of such a sound.[1]

   Synonyms: echo, resonance, reverberation

   Antonym: foresound

   Hypernym: after-impression

   • 1659, Nathanael Homes, A Sermon Preached before Parliament, London: Edward Brewster, 1660, p. 33,

     […] the strings of an instrument, […] being strucken with the hand, do verberate the ayre in its first sound, and are reverberated by the ayre to an after-sound.

   • 1970, Elmore Leonard, Valdez is Coming, Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, Chapter 7, p. 132,

     He fired the Winchester twice again, into the distance, then lowered it, the ringing aftersound of the gunfire in his ears.

   • 1985, Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice, Penguin, 2001, Part 2, p. 189,

     Edward was awakened that night by a loud clattering noise which left an after-sound of high ringing.

   • 2021, Colm Tóibín, The Magician, New York: Scribner, Chapter 18,

     And the aftersound of the music played in the light-filled drawing room would grow closer to pure silence each year, until time ended.

2. (acoustics) The second, slower phase of decay in the sound made by a piano string when it is struck.[2]

   Coordinate term: prompt sound

3. (phonetics, obsolete) A weaker sound that immediately follows a more salient one, such as the second, less prominent vowel sound in a falling diphthong.
   • 1881, Louis Lucien Bonaparte, “The simple sounds of all the living Slavonic languages compared with those of the principal Neo-Latin and Germano-Scandinavian Tongues,” Transactions of the Philological Society, 1880-1881, p. 377,

     In English I cannot hear the sound of Italian o chiuso, but only that of (o 5) followed by an aftersound, as in home, or without this aftersound, as in more.

   • 1910, Max Niedermann, Outlines of Latin Phonetics, London: Routledge, p. 46,

     They [gu and qu] were not groups formed of a guttural stop and the semi-vowel v, but guttural stops with a labial aftersound; the latter receiving a very much weaker articulation than the semi-vowel v.

References

1. W. A. Newman Dorland, Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, Philadelphia: Saunders, 1980: “sensation of a sound after cessation of the stimulus causing it.”
2. Malcolm J. Crocker (ed.), Encyclopedia of Acoustics, New York: Wiley, 1997, Volume 4.