unacoustic

English

Etymology

un- +‎ acoustic

Adjective

unacoustic (comparative more unacoustic, superlative most unacoustic)

1. Having poor acoustic properties; not conducive to the projection of sound; tending to muffle or muddy sounds.
   • 1912, Organ Playing: Its Technique and Expression, page 46:

     The application of staccato chords has to be strictly limited in unacoustic places, but in resonant buildings, staccato chords, used judiciously, have a very fine effect, as they evoke the echoes from the building in a more effective way than a long sustained chord, however promptly released.

   • 1914, William Chalmers Covert, Wild Woods and Waterways, page 22:

     This unacoustic vastness swallows the earth sounds and produces the effect of silence upon the soul.

   • 1993, Fergus Fleming, Amaryllis Fleming, page 270:

     Few are like the Scottish fiddle-maker Amaryllis once met who had spent a cheerful life making violins out of oak (an impossibly unacoustic wood) on the happy premise that birds sing more beautifully in oak trees.

   • 2010, Astor Bristed, Charles Bristed, Five Years in an English University, →ISBN, page 169:

     No wonder, for the pulpit had been placed in exactly the most inaudible situation, and the Hall, however well calculated for purposes of feeding, and holding examinations, was a most unacoustic place to speak in.

2. Lacking sound or sonority; silent or muffled.
   • 1940, Royal Society of Medicine (Great Britain), Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine - Volume 34, page 309:

     The deaf-mutes from a separate community among the hearing people. The most interesting question in their psychology is: What is their conception of the outer world? Of an unacoustic, mute world?

   • 1990, Victor Howard Carpenter, Stations of the spirit, →ISBN, page 182:

     There are times when people prevent life's music from penetrating. There are situations, historical, personal, sociological, and political as well as psychological, in which whole peoples feel imprisoned in a leaden, unacoustic atmosphere.

   • 2005, Brendan Moran, Monad Rrenban, Wild, Unforgettable Philosophy: In Early Works of Walter Benjamin, →ISBN:

     Within the "unacoustic" languages issuing from "matter [Material]," there may indeed be a "material community of things" and this may occasion usages such as sculpture or painting that translate into "an infinitely higher language" still of the same specific material sphere.

   • 2007, Harald William Fawkner, Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestation of Affectivity, →ISBN, page 35:

     When Owen Glendower sports various reverberations that lack sonorousness, such unacoustic micro-events do not fall into the work like random meteorites whose trajectories happen to cross the orbit of the writer's imagination. Instead the unacoustic reverberation is emitted from the work's core.

3. (physics) Having a frequency outside the range of audible sounds.
   • 1963, John Von Neumann, Collected Works: Theory of games, astrophysics, hydrodynamics and meteorology, page 250:

     These results deserve a brief discussion, because they contain the first indications about the "unacoustic" effects in shock reflection : That is, the deviations which shocks of finite strength present from the "acoustic" laws, which hold asymptotically for shocks of infinitesimal strength.

   • 1992, Norman Macrae, John Von Neumann, →ISBN:

     We were mostly concerned with the reflection and refraction of shocks in the unacoustic domain; we found that entirely new forms of these processes, connected with extraordinary pressures and production of vortex sheets, exist there.

4. (music) Not acoustic; electronically generated or amplified.
   • 1997, Alex Igoudin, Impact of MIDI on electroacoustic art music - Issue 102, page 122:

     Our next respondent agrees with the previous opinion but also points out interest in using the computer for synthesizing original 'unacoustic' sounds.

   • 2014, The Rough Guide to Southeast Asia On A Budget, →ISBN:

     Leave the backpackers behind and join Saigon's student population to see the seriously un-acoustic local rock bands performing predominantly American covers every night in this heaving live music hub at the end of a narrow alleyway.