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Sonority

Musical Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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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

Sonority is the quality, richness, and character of a sound or combination of sounds.

Detailed Definition
Sonority concerns how a sound occupies auditory space, including its fullness, brightness, roughness, resonance, and weight. In poetry, the term helps describe the felt body of language beyond literal meaning. Vowels, consonants, line length, spacing, and repeated phonemes can make a passage sonorous, brittle, muffled, or hollow. Attention to sonority lets a poet shape atmosphere through the mouth and ear as well as through image and idea.
Example
Example in poetry:
Dense alliteration in “black branches break” produces a hard, concentrated sonority; Long vowels in “blue moon over water” create a round, resonant sonority; A poet can change sonority from bright to heavy by moving from open vowels to clusters of dark consonants; Reading a poem aloud reveals its sonority through the blend of vowels, consonants, stress, and silence
Additional Notes
Sonority describes the distinctive fullness, texture, brightness, or depth of a sound. It concerns how sounds blend and resonate, not only their pitch or volume. In poetry, sonority can arise from vowel patterns, consonant clusters, repeated syllables, and the contrast between open, ringing sounds and muted ones.
Also Known As
Sound Quality Tone Quality
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