Home › Glossary › Letter A

Acoustic envelope

Sound
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The overall auditory contour of a poetic passage, shaped by patterns of pitch, volume, tempo, and timbre across lines or stanzas.

Detailed Definition
Aubade lament merges the traditional aubade—a dawn song celebrating or lamenting the departure of lovers at daybreak—with elegiac or mournful tones, transforming the genre’s typical erotic urgency into a meditation on loss, transience, or separation; unlike the celebratory or anxious aubade, the aubade lament emphasizes the sorrow of parting as inevitable and final, often using dawn imagery ironically to underscore emotional darkness, as in Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” which confronts mortality rather than romantic farewell.
Example
Example in poetry:
An acoustic envelope describes the sonic contour of a poem—its rise and fall in volume, pitch, and resonance—as heard in Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night,” with its rolling, incantatory cadences.
Additional Notes
Sound envelope around poem—tonal atmosphere from sonic choices. Phonetic texture, echo, resonance patterns. Musical term applied to poetry. Consider in sound-focused analysis.
Also Known As
Sound contour Acoustic shape Auditory boundary
Skip to main content