Glossary: P

Pacific Audio Visual Institute (PAVI) was a private educational institution that specializes in music production and music management…

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space is a 1994 book by the astronomer Carl Sagan. It is the sequel to Sagan's 1980 book…

Panning is the distribution of an audio signal (either monaural or stereophonic pairs) into a new stereo or multi-channel sound field…

Panning law, or panning rule, is a recording and mixing principle that states that any signal of equal amplitude and phase that is played…

The pant-hoot is a loud, structurally complex vocalization of chimpanzees. The call is generally divided into four distinct, successive…

A paper popper is a party prank that is commonly used in schools. There are many variations of a paper popper, but they all involve a…

A parabolic loudspeaker is a loudspeaker which seeks to focus its sound in coherent plane waves either by reflecting sound output from a…

Parallel compression, also known as New York compression, is a dynamic range compression technique used in sound recording and mixing.

In music theory, a major scale and a minor scale that have the same starting note (tonic) are called parallel keys and are said to be in a…

A parametric array, in the field of acoustics, is a nonlinear transduction mechanism that generates narrow, nearly side lobe-free beams of…

Parametric stereo (abbreviated as PS) is an audio compression algorithm used as an audio coding format for digital audio.

Pareidolia is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one…

In human anatomy, the pars flaccida of tympanic membrane or Shrapnell's membrane (also known as Rivinus' ligament) is the small…

In acoustics, particle acceleration is the acceleration (rate of change in speed and direction) of particles in a sound transmission…

Particle displacement or displacement amplitude is a measurement of distance of the movement of a sound particle from its equilibrium…

Particle velocity (denoted v or SVL) is the velocity of a particle (real or imagined) in a medium as it transmits a wave. The SI unit of…

Partiels is a 1975 music composition by French composer Gérard Grisey. Written for 18 instruments, the piece is considered a defining work…

A speaker enclosure using a passive radiator usually contains an "active loudspeaker" (or main driver), and a passive radiator (also…

A patch panel is a device or unit featuring a number of jacks, usually of the same or similar type, for the use of connecting and routing…

The Pattison Waltz was a dance piece by the pianist and composer J.N. Pattison, published in 1877. It was popular in the 1880s and was…

Patulous Eustachian tube is the name of a physical disorder where the Eustachian tube, which is normally closed, instead stays…

A peak programme meter (PPM) is an instrument used in professional audio that indicates the level of an audio signal.

The Peavey 5150 is a vacuum tube based guitar amplifier made by Peavey Electronics from 1992 on. The amplifier was initially created as a…

In music, a pedal point (also pedal note, organ point, pedal tone, or pedal) is a sustained tone, typically in the bass, during which at…

Pedal tones or "pedals" are special low notes on brass instruments that sound at the fundamental tone of the instrument's harmonic series.

Pelog (Sundanese: ᮕᮦᮜᮧᮌ᮪, romanized: Pélog /pelog/, Javanese: ꦥꦺꦭꦺꦴꦒ꧀, Balinese: ᬧᬾᬮᭀᬕ᭄, romanized: Pélog /pelok/) is one of the essential…

Pendred syndrome is a genetic disorder leading to congenital bilateral sensorineural hearing loss and goitre with euthyroid or mild…

In music, a pensato (Italian: "thought") is a composed imaginary note, a written note which is neither played nor heard. "This meant that…

A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave, in contrast to heptatonic scales, which have seven notes per octave…

Infrasound is sound at frequencies lower than the low frequency end of human hearing threshold at 20 Hz. It is known, however, that humans…

The Percussion Concerto is a one-movement concerto for solo percussion and orchestra by the American composer Jennifer Higdon.

In Western music theory, a perfect fifth (abbreviated P5) is a musical interval corresponding to a pair of pitches with a frequency ratio…

On February 4, 2009, Congressman John Conyers, Jr. introduced H.R. 848, the Performance Rights Act in the U.S. House of Representatives…

In sound technology, personal sound refers to a range of software solutions that customize an audio device's sound output to match the…

Personal Sound Amplification Products, also known as "Personal Sound Amplification Devices," or by the acronym PSAP, are defined by the U.S.

Personics was the company that invented the music recording retail system with trade name "Personics System" that was introduced in record…

Perspecta was a directional motion picture sound system invented by the laboratories at Fine Sound Inc. in 1954. The company was founded…

Phacoemulsification is a cataract surgery method in which the internal lens of the eye which has developed a cataract is emulsified with…

Phantom center refers to the psycho-acoustic phenomenon of a sound source appearing to emanate from a point between two speakers in a…

Phantom power, in the context of professional audio equipment, is direct current (DC) electric power equally applied to both signal wires…

The pharmacology of ethanol involves both pharmacodynamics (how it affects the body) and pharmacokinetics (how the body processes it).

In signal processing, phase distortion or phase-frequency distortion is distortion, that is, change in the shape of the waveform, that…

Phase distortion (PD) synthesis is a synthesis method introduced in 1984 by Casio in its CZ range of synthesizers. In outline, it is…

In a loudspeaker, a phase plug, phasing plug or acoustical transformer is a mechanical interface between a speaker driver and the audience.

Phased array ultrasonics (PA) is an advanced method of ultrasonic testing that has applications in medical imaging and industrial…

A phaser or phase shifter is an electronic sound processor used to filter a signal by creating a series of peaks and troughs in the…

Philomel, a serial composition written in 1964, combines synthesizer with both live and recorded soprano voice. It is Milton Babbitt's…

The phon is a logarithmic unit of loudness level for tones and complex sounds. Loudness is measured in sones, a linear unit.

Phonagnosia (from Ancient Greek φωνή phone, "voice" and γνῶσις gnosis, "knowledge") or voice blindness is a type of agnosia, or loss of…

The phonautograph is the earliest known device for recording sound. Previously, tracings had been obtained of the sound-producing…

A phone connector is a family of cylindrically shaped electrical connectors primarily for analog audio signals. Invented in the late 19th…

Phono input is a set of input jacks, usually mini jacks or RCA connectors, located on the rear panel of a preamp, mixer or amplifier…

A phono stage, also known as a phono amplifier or phono preamplifier, is an electronic audio component that amplifies the signal from a…

The Phonodeik is a sound-recording apparatus invented by Dayton Miller in 1908. The Phonodeik converts sound waves into visual images. The…

Phonograph cylinders (also referred to as Edison cylinders after their creator Thomas Edison) are the earliest commercial medium for…

A phonograph record (also known as a gramophone record, especially in British English) or a vinyl record (for later varieties only) is a…

A phonon is a quasiparticle of vibrational energy that uniformly oscillates at a single frequency in a medium. They can be thought of as…

Phonophobia, also called ligyrophobia or sonophobia, is a fear of or aversion to specific sounds—a type of specific phobia as well as a…

In United States copyright law, phonorecord is a term of art for a material object that embodies sounds (other than those accompanying…

Phonurgia Nova ("New Science of Sound Production") is a 1673 work by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. It is notable for being the…

The photoacoustic effect or optoacoustic effect is the formation of sound waves following light absorption in a material sample.

Physical acoustics is the area of acoustics and physics that studies interactions of acoustic waves with a gaseous, liquid or solid…

The Piano Concerto No. 1 in B♭ minor, Op. 23, was composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky between November 1874 and February 1875. It was…

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, is a concerto for piano and orchestra composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff between June 1900 and…

This is a list of the fundamental frequencies in hertz (cycles per second) of the keys of a modern 88-key standard or 112-key extended…

"Piano Man" is a song written and performed by American singer-songwriter Billy Joel. First released as a single in the US in 1974, it was…

A piano roll is a music storage medium used to operate a player piano, piano player or reproducing piano. Piano rolls, like other music…

Piano tuning is the process of adjusting the tension of the strings of an acoustic piano so that the musical intervals between strings are…

A Picardy third, (; French: tierce picarde) also known as a Picardy cadence or Tierce de Picardie, is a major chord of the tonic at the…

A pickup group is a group of professional musicians, which may be session musicians, who are hired to play for a limited time…

Picosecond ultrasonics is a type of ultrasonics that uses ultra-high frequency ultrasound generated by ultrashort light pulses.

Picture discs are gramophone (phonograph) records that show images on their playing surface, rather than being of plain black or colored…

Piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUT) are MEMS-based piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers. Unlike bulk piezoelectric…

Pinch wheel or pinch roller is the term for the "rubber" wheel which forms part of the drive mechanism in many forms of tape recorder and…

Ping-pong recording (more commonly known as "bouncing tracks" or "bouncing down") is a multitrack audio recording technique which takes…

Pink noise, 1/f noise, fractional noise or fractal noise is a signal or process with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral…

This article describes the process and techniques involved in the tuning of a pipe organ. Electronic organs typically do not require…

Pirates Press is a vinyl broker located in Emeryville, California, that was founded in 2004. The company was started in the bedroom of…

Pitch is the quality that makes it possible to judge sounds as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies. Pitch…

Pitch accent is a term used in autosegmental-metrical theory for local intonational features that are associated with particular syllables.

In music, a pitch class (p.c. or pc) is a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart; for example, the pitch class C…

In music theory, pitch-class space is the circular space representing all the notes (pitch classes) in a musical octave. In this space…

A pitch constellation is a graphical representation of pitches used to describe musical scales, modes, chords or other groupings of…

In linguistics, speech synthesis, and music, the pitch contour of a sound is a function or curve that tracks the perceived pitch of the…

A variable speed pitch control (or vari-speed) is a control on an audio device such as a turntable, tape recorder, or CD player that…

Pitch correction is an electronic effects unit or audio software that changes the intonation (highness or lowness in pitch) of an audio…

A pitch detection algorithm (PDA) is an algorithm designed to estimate the pitch or fundamental frequency of a quasiperiodic or…

The pitch of a brass instrument corresponds to the lowest playable resonance frequency of the open instrument. The combined resonances…

In speech, phonetic pitch reset occurs at the boundaries (pausa) between prosodic units.

In music theory, pitch spaces model relationships between pitches. These models typically use distance to model the degree of relatedness…

A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as…

Place theory is a theory of hearing that states that our perception of sound depends on where each component frequency produces vibrations…

An acoustic duct or plane wave tube is a test facility used in acoustics. Anechoic chambers are typically subject to a low frequency…

Plant bioacoustics refers to the creation of sound waves by plants. Measured sound emissions by plants as well as differential germination…

Platform screen doors (PSDs), also known as platform edge doors (PEDs), are used at some train, rapid transit and people mover stations to…

The Play:1 (branded as the PLAY:1) is a smart speaker developed by Sonos, announced and released on October 14, 2013, as the fourth and…

The Play:3 (branded as the PLAY:3) is a smart speaker developed by Sonos, announced and released on July 20, 2011, as the second product…

Playing the Building was an art installation by David Byrne, ex-singer of Talking Heads, and Färgfabriken, an independent art venue in…

PlayTape is an 1⁄8 inch (3.2 mm) analog magnetic tape format which runs at 3¾ i.p.s., has a frequency range of 50 Hz to 8kHz, "the same as…

PMCD (PreMaster CD) is a specially formatted, recordable Compact Disc designed to be sent to a CD pressing plant for replication.

Pocket Disc was a type of flexidisc, made by Americom Corporation and experimented with in the late 1960s, small enough (4 in (10 cm) in…

Pocket Rockers was a brand of personal stereo produced by Fisher-Price in the late 1980s, aimed at elementary school-age children.

POCUS (point-of-care ultrasonography or point-of-care ultrasound) is defined as the acquisition, interpretation, and immediate clinical…

pointblank is a global network of music production schools founded in London in 1994 by musician and producer Robert Cowan, offering a…

Poly(ethyl methacrylate) (PEMA) is a hydrophobic synthetic acrylate polymer. It has properties similar to the more common PMMA, however it…

Polyspectra, also known as higher-order spectra, are frequency-domain statistical quantities that generalize the spectral density (power…

A pop filter, pop shield or pop screen is a noise protection filter for microphones, typically used in a recording studio.

Porgy and Bess ( PORG-ee) is an English-language opera by American composer George Gershwin, with a libretto written by author DuBose…

Poromechanics is a branch of physics and specifically continuum mechanics that studies the behavior of fluid-saturated porous media.

Portastudio refers to a series of multitrack recorders produced by TASCAM beginning in 1979 with the introduction of the TEAC 144, the…

Positional alcohol nystagmus (PAN) is nystagmus (visible jerkiness in eye movement) produced when the head is placed in a sideways position.

Post-lingual deafness is a deafness which develops after the acquisition of speech and language, usually after the age of six.

Power alley is a term used in audio engineering to denote the line between subwoofers where output from each subwoofer is in phase and is…

The power bandwidth of an amplifier is sometimes taken as the frequency range (or, rarely, the upper frequency limit) for which the rated…

In a loudspeaker, power compression or thermal compression is a loss of efficiency observed as the voice coil heats up under operation…

In electrical engineering, the power gain of an electrical network is the ratio of an output power to an input power.

Powered speakers, also known as self-powered speakers and active speakers, are loudspeakers that have built-in amplifiers.

Poème électronique (English translation: "Electronic Poem") is an eight-minute piece of electronic music by composer Edgard Varèse…

The Prague Symphony Orchestra (Czech: Symfonický orchestr hlavního města Prahy FOK) is a Czech orchestra based in Prague.

In audio signal processing, pre-echo, is a digital audio compression artifact where in the reconstructed signal (following an…

A preamplifier, also known as a preamp, is an electronic amplifier that converts a weak electrical signal into an output signal strong…

The precedence effect or law of the first wavefront is a binaural psychoacoustical effect concerning sound reflection and the perception…

In acoustics, the prefix of a sound is an initial phase, the onset of a sound quite dissimilar to the ensuing lasting vibration.

The pregap on a Red Book audio CD is the portion of the audio track that precedes "index 01" for a given track in the table of contents…

Presbycusis (also spelled presbyacusis, from Greek πρέσβυς presbys "old" + ἄκουσις akousis "hearing"), or age-related hearing loss, is the…

In an amplifier, a presence control boosts the upper mid-range frequencies to make the sounds of voices and instruments with similar tonal…

In filmmaking and television production, presence, also known as room tone, or simply room sound, is the "silence" recorded at a location…

Preservation of magnetic audiotape comprises techniques for handling, cleaning and storage of magnetic audiotapes in an archival…

Prestin is a protein that is critical to sensitive hearing in mammals. It is encoded by the SLC26A5 (solute carrier anion transporter…

Print-through is a generally undesirable effect that arises in the use of magnetic tape for storing analog signals, in which a signal…

The ProCo RAT is a distortion pedal produced by ProCo Sound for use with electric guitar. The RAT has become one of the industry's most…

Pro Tools is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed and released by Avid Technology (formerly Digidesign) for Microsoft Windows and…

Process analytical chemistry (PAC) is the application of analytical chemistry with specialized techniques, algorithms, and sampling…

Mitsubishi's ProDigi was a professional audio, reel-to-reel, digital audio tape format with a stationary head position, similar to Sony's…

Producing Great Sound for Film and Video: Expert Tips from Preproduction to Final Mix is a non-fiction, filmmaking handbook. It covers the…

In the production of phonograph records – discs that were commonly made of shellac, and later, vinyl – sound was recorded directly onto a…

Professional audio, abbreviated as pro audio, refers to both an activity and a category of high-quality, studio-grade audio equipment.

A professional audio store is a retail business that sells, and in many cases rents, sound reinforcement system equipment and PA system…

The proximity effect in audio is an increase in bass or low frequency response when a sound source is close to a cardioid or similar…

Prusten is a form of communicative behaviour exhibited by some members of the family Felidae. Prusten is also referred to as chuffing…

In music theory, a pseudo-octave, pseudooctave,

In computational physics, pseudospectral time-domain method (PSTD) is a numerical analysis technique for simulating wave propagation.

The Perceptual Signal Processing Lab, or PSPLab, is an audio research lab of National Chiao Tung University. It is located in Hsinchu…

Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of the perception of sound by the human auditory system. It…

A public address system (also known as Tannoy or PA system) is an electronic system comprising microphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers, and…

The Pultec EQP-1 Program Equalizer is an audio equalizer unit originally produced by Pulse Techniques (Pultec) from 1956 to 1981, and…

In sound recording and reproduction, and music, pumping or gain pumping is a creative misuse of compression, the "audible unnatural level…

Punch in/out is an audio and video term that originated as a recording technique used on early multitrack recordings whereby a portion of…

In psychoacoustics and signal processing, a pure tone is a sound or other signal with a sinusoidal waveform; that is, a sine wave of…

Pure-tone audiometry is the main hearing test used to identify hearing threshold levels of an individual, enabling determination of the…

A purr or whirr is a tonal fluttering sound made by some species of felids, including both larger, wild cats and the domestic cat (Felis…

"Put Your Head on My Shoulder" is a song written by Canadian-born singer-songwriter Paul Anka, recorded in August 1958 at Bell Sound…

Pyknon (Greek: πυκνόν), sometimes also transliterated as pycnon (πυκνός, 'close, close-packed, crowded, condensed'; Latin: spissus) in the…

The pyramidal eminence is a hollow conical projection upon the posterior wall of the tympanic cavity of the middle ear. The stapedius…

Pyrox Pty Ltd was an Australian precision engineering firm with offices in Melbourne.

According to legend, Pythagoras discovered the foundations of musical tuning by listening to the sounds of four blacksmith's hammers…