sympathetic vibration
1
7.4
- noun
- /ˌsɪmpəˈθɛtɪk vaɪˈbreɪʃən/
- Specialized
:
vibración simpática
- He explained how a sympathetic vibration can affect nearby objects.
Examples
-
Engineers must consider sympathetic vibration when designing bridges to avoid structural resonance.
-
The glass shattered due to a sympathetic vibration from the loud music.
-
The glass shattered due to the sympathetic vibration induced by the singer's powerful note.
-
When you play a note on one piano, sympathetic vibration can cause strings in a nearby piano to sound as well.
-
When the tuning fork vibrated, it created a sympathetic vibration in the nearby glass, causing it to resonate.
-
The sound of the cello produced a sympathetic vibration in the wooden floorboards, amplifying the music throughout the room.
-
During the experiment, the researchers observed a sympathetic vibration in two metal plates that were resonating at the same frequency.
Synonyms
27
6.9
When an object vibrates strongly at a specific frequency and shows a large response
How Strong
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun phrase is compositionally built from 'sympathetic' (here meaning resonance-induced oscillation) and 'vibration' (repeated back-and-forth movement), so the sense of a vibration caused by resonance follows directly from the constituents. While 'sympathetic' also has an everyday emotional sense, in technical contexts the resonance sense is regular and cross-linguistically reflected, making the overall meaning predictable for learners who know the constituent senses.
Etymology
Sympathetic vibration comes from a simple physical image: vibration is the shaking, and sympathetic means a second object 'feels' the first and begins to shake when they have the same speed of shaking. So, sympathetic vibration means 'a vibration in one object caused by another object vibrating at the same speed'.