(n.) An instrument by means of which the bolt of a lock is shot or drawn; usually, a removable metal instrument fitted to the mechanism of a particular lock and operated by turning in its place.
(n.) An instrument which is turned like a key in fastening or adjusting any mechanism; as, a watch key; a bed key, etc.
(n.) That part of an instrument or machine which serves as the means of operating it; as, a telegraph key; the keys of a pianoforte, or of a typewriter.
(n.) A position or condition which affords entrance, control, pr possession, etc.; as, the key of a line of defense; the key of a country; the key of a political situation. Hence, that which serves to unlock, open, discover, or solve something unknown or difficult; as, the key to a riddle; the key to a problem.
(n.) That part of a mechanism which serves to lock up, make fast, or adjust to position.
(n.) A piece of wood used as a wedge.
(n.) The last board of a floor when laid down.
(n.) A keystone.
(n.) That part of the plastering which is forced through between the laths and holds the rest in place.
(n.) A wedge to unite two or more pieces, or adjust their relative position; a cotter; a forelock.
(n.) A bar, pin or wedge, to secure a crank, pulley, coupling, etc., upon a shaft, and prevent relative turning; sometimes holding by friction alone, but more frequently by its resistance to shearing, being usually embedded partly in the shaft and partly in the crank, pulley, etc.
(n.) An indehiscent, one-seeded fruit furnished with a wing, as the fruit of the ash and maple; a samara; -- called also key fruit.
(n.) A family of tones whose regular members are called diatonic tones, and named key tone (or tonic) or one (or eight), mediant or three, dominant or five, subdominant or four, submediant or six, supertonic or two, and subtonic or seven. Chromatic tones are temporary members of a key, under such names as " sharp four," "flat seven," etc. Scales and tunes of every variety are made from the tones of a key.
(n.) The fundamental tone of a movement to which its modulations are referred, and with which it generally begins and ends; keynote.
(n.) Fig: The general pitch or tone of a sentence or utterance.
(v. t.) To fasten or secure firmly; to fasten or tighten with keys or wedges.
Example Sentences:
(1) Community involvement is a key element of the Primary Health Care (PHC) approach, and thus an essential topic on a course for managers of Primary Health Care programmes.
(2) A key way of regaining public trust will be reforming the system of remuneration as agreed by the G20.
(3) Instead, the White House opted for a low-key approach, publishing a blogpost profiling Trinace Edwards, a brain-tumour victim who recently discovered she was eligible for Medicaid coverage.
(4) The presence of a few key residues in the amino-terminal alpha-helix of each ligand is sufficient to confer specificity to the interaction.
(5) The key warning from the Fed chair A summary of Bernanke's hearing Earlier... MPs in London quizzed the Bank of England on Libor.
(6) "Seller reports are key to identifying bad buyers and ridding them from our marketplace," says eBay.
(7) It is suggested that the low-density lipoprotein receptors in human fetal liver may play a key role in the regulation of the serum cholesterol levels during gestation.
(8) A key component of a career program should be recognition of a nurse's needs and the program should be evaluated to determine if these needs are met.
(9) As novel antibody therapeutics are developed for different malignancies and require evaluation with cells previously uncharacterized as antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC) targets, efficient description of key parameters of the assay system expedites the preclinical assessment.
(10) Meanwhile, Hunt has been accused of backtracking on a key recommendation in the official report into Mid Staffs.
(11) The safe motherhood initiative demands an intersectoral, collaborative approach to gynecology, family planning, and child health in which midwifery is the key element.
(12) Acetylcholinesterase is a key enzyme in cholinergic neurotransmission for hydrolyzing acetylcholine and has been shown to possess arylacylamidase activity in addition to esterase activity.
(13) If Lagarde had been placed under formal investigation in the Tapie case, it would have risked weakening her position and further embarrassing both the IMF and France by heaping more judicial worries on a key figure on the international stage.
(14) Four goals, four assists, and constant movement have been a key part of the team’s success.
(15) Mechanosensitive ion channels may play a key role in transducing vascular smooth muscle (VSM) stretch into active force development.
(16) But Abaaoud, the man thought to be a key planner for the group behind the Paris attacks, boasted to a niece that he had brought around 90 militants back to Europe with him.
(17) Key therapeutic questions are whether beta-lactams can safely replace aminoglycosides for the treatment of gram-negative pneumonia, and whether monotherapy or aminoglycoside and beta-lactam combination antibiotic treatment is superior.
(18) Teaching procedures then establish and build these key components to fluency.
(19) Doubts about Hinkley Point have deepened after a detailed report by HSBC’s energy analysts described eight key challenges to the project, which will be built by the state-backed French firm EDF and be part-financed by investment from China .
(20) The Lords will vote on three key amendments: • To exclude child benefit from the cap calculation (this would roughly halve the number of households affected).
Tonality
Definition:
(n.) The principle of key in music; the character which a composition has by virtue of the key in which it is written, or through the family relationship of all its tones and chords to the keynote, or tonic, of the whole.
Example Sentences:
(1) Preliminary rhythmic somatic stimulation has a predominantly facilitating effect on EPs appearing in response to tonal stimuli in the areas A1, S2, S1.
(2) The stimuli were two simple tones in experiment 1 and two tonal complexes in both experiments 2 and 3.
(3) The influence of long-term knowledge and immediate context on the perception of tonal structure in polytonal music is discussed.
(4) This paper extends previous research on listeners' abilities to discriminate the details of brief tonal components occurring within sequential auditory patterns (Watson et al., 1975, 1976).
(5) The DLs for speech were similar to those for tonal complex stimuli in both the filled and unfilled conditions.
(6) Using tonal stimuli based on the nonspeech stimuli of Mattingly et al., we found that subjects, with appropriate practice, could classify nonspeech chirp, short bleat, and bleat continua with boundaries equivalent to the syllable place continuum of Mattingly et al.
(7) It captures the fact that the eclectic and inventive Adams - who cut his compositional teeth as a member of the minimalist school in the 1970s and 1980s, and then moved on into less strict forms of tonal music - is almost certainly America's most widely performed contemporary composer.
(8) Furthermore, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) calculated from the density histogram of the maxillary sinus has been employed to perform the tonal evaluation of the intra-maxillary pathological changes.
(9) Complementary examination should allow to not turn down definitely experienced pilots with a bad tonal threshold but with good psycho-acoustic performance.
(10) Tonally, at least, Mr Osborne did not deliver a 1981 austerity budget.
(11) In all the patients ERA were recorded, and in children over 3 years old tonal audiometry was performed.
(12) The surgical feasibility of multichannel implantation in patients with Mondini dysplasia should open the door for improved speech recognition and tonal discrimination in this subset of patients.
(13) Potentials evoked by tonal pulses and recorded with a monopolar electrode on the pial surface over the auditory cortex of the guinea pig are presented.
(14) There was a 50-Hz masker band centered on the 1250-Hz tonal signal, and four 50-Hz flanker bands centered at 850, 1050, 1450, and 1650 Hz.
(15) The results illustrate an interactive influence of pitch and temporal variables on musical perception and thereby highlight the need to incorporate dynamic pattern factors into internal representations of tonality.
(16) After kittens birth the range of changes narrowed and reactions with maximum amplitude were recorded in females to presentation of tonal bursts with frequencies which corresponded to spectral characteristics of their own kittens vocalizations.
(17) Test-retest reliabilities for the Tonal and Rhythm subtests were .81 and .86, respectively, for the retarded group.
(18) Results from the phonemic identification tests indicated that tones produced by alaryngeal speakers were not only perceived at much lower levels of accuracy than those produced by normal speakers, but the patterns of tonal confusions for alaryngeal speakers were also dissimilar to those for normal speakers.
(19) Twelve possums were anaesthetized with ketamine and chloralose-urethane, and recordings were made of extracellular unit discharges in the inferior colliculus during monaural and binaural tonal stimulation.
(20) Here, the broadband maskers consisted of three adjacent spectral bands--one centered on the frequency of the tonal signal, one low passed below the lower edge of the center band, and one high passed above the upper edge of the center band.