What's the difference between hum and tune?

Hum


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To make a low, prolonged sound, like that of a bee in flight; to drone; to murmur; to buzz; as, a top hums.
  • (v. i.) To make a nasal sound, like that of the letter m prolonged, without opening the mouth, or articulating; to mumble in monotonous undertone; to drone.
  • (v. i.) To make an inarticulate sound, like h'm, through the nose in the process of speaking, from embarrassment or a affectation; to hem.
  • (v. i.) To express satisfaction by a humming noise.
  • (v. i.) To have the sensation of a humming noise; as, my head hums, -- a pathological condition.
  • (v. t.) To sing with shut mouth; to murmur without articulation; to mumble; as, to hum a tune.
  • (v. t.) To express satisfaction with by humming.
  • (v. t.) To flatter by approving; to cajole; to impose on; to humbug.
  • (n.) A low monotonous noise, as of bees in flight, of a swiftly revolving top, of a wheel, or the like; a drone; a buzz.
  • (n.) Any inarticulate and buzzing sound
  • (n.) The confused noise of a crowd or of machinery, etc., heard at a distance; as, the hum of industry.
  • (n.) A buzz or murmur, as of approbation.
  • (n.) An imposition or hoax.
  • (interj.) An inarticulate nasal sound or murmur, like h'm, uttered by a speaker in pause from embarrassment, affectation, etc.
  • (interj.) A kind of strong drink formerly used.
  • (interj.) Ahem; hem; an inarticulate sound uttered in a pause of speech implying doubt and deliberation.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) As he sits in Athens wondering when the International Monetary Fund is going to deliver another bailout, George Papandreou might be tempted to hum a few lines of Tired of Waiting for You.
  • (2) Although the cranes swing, much of the new living zones now being created range from the ho-hum to the outright catastrophic.
  • (3) Mononuclear cells were fractionated from human cord blood by affinity chromatography on immobilized peanut agglutinin, as previously described (Rosenberg et al., Hum Immunol 7:67, 1983).
  • (4) Managers scurry back and forth across the Atlantic with advance copies handcuffed to their wrists, critics are required to sign contracts promising that they will not so much as hum the contents to their nearest and dearest, and the music press acts as if the world is about to witness the most significant release since Nelson Mandela's.
  • (5) He shook his head from side to side, whispering or humming the same three-note tune.
  • (6) The apolipoprotein E3-Leiden variant has been shown to be associated with familial dysbetalipoproteinemia (FD) in a dominant manner (Havekes et al., Hum Genet 1986;73:157-163).
  • (7) The politics of football have long been accompanied by a background hum of corruption claims, but in recent times it has become a cacophony.
  • (8) Selling its own phone would mean it could make itself the background hum of many peoples' lives everywhere – and show adverts and collect data on its own terms.
  • (9) His father, who was fond of humming the popular ballad Keep Right on to the End of the Road, lost his job in the great depression of the early 1930s.
  • (10) Hollow-eyed children beg outside restaurants and cafes that hum with the chatter of shisha-smoking customers.
  • (11) Her hums on early awards buzz Speaking of Oscar contenders, it will be fascinating to see how Spike Jonze's latest movie pans out.
  • (12) That robs astronomy of one of its key recruiting tools: the chance to plant young scientists under the dish and let its hum capture their imagination.
  • (13) Four hours from the Zurich madhouse, Uefa’s base on the shores of Lake Geneva in Nyon hums with calm purpose.
  • (14) He made politics great again in the sense of getting people to care instead of allowing it to hum softly in the background.
  • (15) I am not sure that a lucrative career in rape gags is more helpful than a failed one, but the rape hum seems eternal.
  • (16) "I wouldn't say this agreement was entirely ho-hum but it does not address the big ticket issues.
  • (17) And I think Stephen hummed and hah-ed in an embarrassed fashion.
  • (18) humming, whistling) for atonal melody, but that non-musicians could not use any effective strategies for melody coding.
  • (19) At the moment the noise is like a city humming away.
  • (20) Without the faintest idea what I was humming along to, my mother left me to my obsession with nothing more than a shrug.

Tune


Definition:

  • (n.) A sound; a note; a tone.
  • (n.) A rhythmical, melodious, symmetrical series of tones for one voice or instrument, or for any number of voices or instruments in unison, or two or more such series forming parts in harmony; a melody; an air; as, a merry tune; a mournful tune; a slow tune; a psalm tune. See Air.
  • (n.) The state of giving the proper, sound or sounds; just intonation; harmonious accordance; pitch of the voice or an instrument; adjustment of the parts of an instrument so as to harmonize with itself or with others; as, the piano, or the organ, is not in tune.
  • (n.) Order; harmony; concord; fit disposition, temper, or humor; right mood.
  • (v. t.) To put into a state adapted to produce the proper sounds; to harmonize, to cause to be in tune; to correct the tone of; as, to tune a piano or a violin.
  • (v. t.) To give tone to; to attune; to adapt in style of music; to make harmonious.
  • (v. t.) To sing with melody or harmony.
  • (v. t.) To put into a proper state or disposition.
  • (v. i.) To form one sound to another; to form accordant musical sounds.
  • (v. i.) To utter inarticulate harmony with the voice; to sing without pronouncing words; to hum.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The use of sigma 54 promoters, known to require cognate binding proteins, could allow the fine-tuning that provides the temporal ordering of flagellar gene transcription.
  • (2) The tunes weren't quite as easy and lush as they had been, and hints of dissonance crept in.
  • (3) This paper employs a rhetorical form designed to clarify and sharpen the focus of the very special stance required--which must be painstakingly learned under careful supervision--in order to effectively tune in to communications coming from the unconscious of the patient.
  • (4) Fine, but the most important new political fact is the unprecedented wave of support that has latched on to Corbyn: the hundreds of thousands who joined Labour, the thumping majority that handed him the leadership, the huge sections of the country that have tuned out of Westminster droid-talk.
  • (5) Four million viewers tune in to the show every week and two million more watch online the next day.
  • (6) Low calcium causes an increase in optimum frequency, a decrease in current threshold, and an increase in sharpness of tuning in both real axons and axons computed according to the Hodgkin-Huxley formulation; high calcium causes opposite effects.
  • (7) Dictated by underlying physicochemical constraints, deceived at times by the lulling tones of the siren entropy, and constantly vulnerable to the vagaries of other more pervasive forms of biological networking and information transfer encoded in the genes of virus and invading microorganisms, protein biorecognition in higher life forms, and particularly in mammals, represents the finely tuned molecular avenues for the genome to transfer its information to the next generation.
  • (8) Tuning curves of afferent electroreceptive fibers in the anterior lateral line nerve of the weakly electric fish, Sternopygus macrurus, indicate that the tuberous electroreceptors of each individual are well-tuned to its own electric organ discharge (EOD) frequency.
  • (9) It is more in tune with the subjective experiencing a person has of that which defines and moves him in the world.
  • (10) Go Kings go!” The pun-filled press release issued by De Blasio also helpfully included the lyrics to Sinatra’s and Newman’s classic tunes, in case anyone had forgotten.
  • (11) The accuracy of the tuning-performance yields data for an univariate analysis of variance.
  • (12) The tuning curves for orientation of cortical cells maintain, to a first approximation, the same shape at the various levels of mean luminance.
  • (13) Twenty-six rapidly adapting units (RA), eighteen slowly adapting units (SA) and ten Pacinian corpuscle units (PC) were differentiated from each other mainly on the presence of the off response in RA and PC units to a ramp stimulation, the persistence of discharges of the SA units during steady pressure on the receptive field and the classical tuning curve seen in the PC units.
  • (14) The doom-laden voiceover claims Miliband could only secure power through a deal with the SNP and that Salmond would be able to “call the tune”.
  • (15) The use of this selector creates a possibility of reducing the increase in the synchronizing pulse with respect to the channel pulses and eliminating tuning the transmitter's modulator and receiver's selector to each other.
  • (16) I'm sure Evan wouldn't mind me saying that he makes no secret of an occasional discomfort about conventional chord-change playing in jazz, and tends to sit out occasions where it's required, as he did last year in London on a gig in which the pianist Django Bates was reworking Charlie Parker tunes.
  • (17) In general, the results were consistent in showing that there is a systematic change in the variables which define the quality of tuning as hearing loss progressively increases and that these changes are clearly related to outer hair cell losses.
  • (18) For velocity tuning curves, a few cell pairs showed selective attenuation at high speeds, while others showed it at low speeds.
  • (19) The national anthems Nothing to say about the Indian anthem, but the New Zealand one sounds like the theme tune for an 1960s ATV variety spectacular.
  • (20) "I'd tuned in to watch United vs Liverpool in the Premier League," writes Fraser Thomas.

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