Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act or process of modulating.
  • noun The state of being modulated.
  • noun A passing or transition from one key or tonality to another.
  • noun The result of such a transition.
  • noun A change in stress, pitch, loudness, or tone of the voice; an inflection of the voice.
  • noun An instance of such a change or an inflection.
  • noun The harmonious use of language, as in poetry or prose.
  • noun Electronics The variation of a property of an electromagnetic wave or signal, such as its amplitude, frequency, or phase.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of modulating
  • noun The act of inflecting the voice or any instrument in a musical manner.
  • noun The modification of the voice or of utterance to express various shades of meaning or emotion.
  • noun A state or condition reached by a process of modulating, modifying, or varying.
  • noun In Gregorian music, one of the tones in a mode with which every phrase of a melody in that mode must begin and end.
  • noun In modern music, the act, process, or result of changing, in the course of a piece, from one key (tonality) to another, so that a new tone becomes the key-note and the relative significance of all the tones common to both tonalities is altered.
  • noun A musical composition exemplifying modulation.
  • noun Sound modulated; melody.
  • noun In architecture, the proportion of the different parts of an order according to a module.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of modulating, or the state of being modulated.
  • noun rare Sound modulated; melody.
  • noun (Mus.) A change of key, whether transient, or until the music becomes established in the new key; a shifting of the tonality of a piece, so that the harmonies all center upon a new keynote or tonic; the art of transition out of the original key into one nearly related, and so on, it may be, by successive changes, into a key quite remote. There are also sudden and unprepared modulations.
  • noun (Electronics) The alteration of hte amplitude, intensity, frequency, or phase (of the carrier wave of a radio signal) at intervals, so as to represent information to be transmitted.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The process of applying a signal to a carrier, modulating.
  • noun Methods of modulating.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun (electronics) the transmission of a signal by using it to vary a carrier wave; changing the carrier's amplitude or frequency or phase
  • noun the act of modifying or adjusting according to due measure and proportion (as with regard to artistic effect)
  • noun a musical passage moving from one key to another
  • noun rise and fall of the voice pitch
  • noun a manner of speaking in which the loudness or pitch or tone of the voice is modified

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Recovery Option: Emotional modulation is a skill that we learn literally in our parents arms and within our family systems.

    Dr. Tian Dayton: Relationship Dynamics Within the Addicted/Traumatized Family System Dr. Tian Dayton 2010

  • I rather imagine that the neglect and perversion or repression of this modulation is due very largely to the general neglect of the proper development of the imagination and emotion in our whole educational system.

    Public Speaking 1924

  • Another modulation is that of tone colour, the sign of imagination and emotion.

    Public Speaking 1924

  • Astrocytes, previously thought to be unimportant in neuronal transmission, have recently been implicated in long-term modulation of neuronal synapses.

    Health News from Medical News Today 2008

  • Astrocytes, previously thought to be unimportant in neuronal transmission, have recently been implicated in long-term modulation of neuronal synapses.

    Health News from Medical News Today 2008

  • Astrocytes, previously thought to be unimportant in neuronal transmission, have recently been implicated in long-term modulation of neuronal synapses.

    Medlogs - Recent stories 2008

  • The positive clinical results, together with our previously published mechanisms of gene expression modulation related to key metabolic pathways in lipid metabolism, provide impetus for much larger clinical studies.

    Meat and mortality | The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D. 2009

  • (One can also refine the above ansatz in a number of ways, for instance by also introducing a frequency modulation, which is particularly important in models such as the mass-critical NLS which admit a frequency modulation symmetry, but for simplicity we will not consider this more complicated situation here.)

    What's new Terence Tao 2010

  • (One can also refine the above ansatz in a number of ways, for instance by also introducing a frequency modulation, which is particularly important in models such as the mass-critical NLS which admit a frequency modulation symmetry, but for simplicity we will not consider this more complicated situation here.)

    What's new Terence Tao 2010

  • LifeGen Technologies help validate the critical role gene expression modulation plays in the aging process.

    New Studies Show Significant Anti-Aging Benefits of Cordyceps - Yahoo! Finance 2010

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