3. A whining style of speaking; a kind of mournful or artificial strain of voice; an affected speaking with a measured rhythm ahd a regular rise and fall of the voice; as, children often read with a tone.
4. (Mus.) (a) A sound considered as to pitch; as, the seven tones of the octave; she has good high tones. (b) The larger kind of interval between contiguous sounds in the diatonic scale, the smaller being called a semitone as, a whole tone too flat; raise it a tone. (c) The peculiar quality of sound in any voice or instrument; as, a rich tone, a reedy tone. (d) A mode or tune or plain chant; as, the Gregorian tones.
Note: The use of the word tone, both for a sound and for the interval between two sounds or tones, is confusing, but is common — almost universal.
Note: Nearly every musical sound is composite, consisting of several simultaneous tones having different rates of vibration according to fixed laws, which depend upon the nature of the vibrating body and the mode of excitation. The components (of a composite sound) are called partial tones; that one having the lowest rate of vibration is the fundamental tone, and the other partial tones are called harmonics, or overtones. The vibration ratios of the partial tones composing any sound are expressed by all, or by a part, of the numbers in the series 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.; and the quality of any sound (the tone color) is due in part to the presence or absence of overtones as represented in this series, and in part to the greater or less intensity of those present as compared with the fundamental tone and with one another. Resultant tones, combination tones, summation tones, difference tones, Tartini's tones (terms only in part synonymous) are produced by the simultaneous sounding of two or more primary (simple or composite) tones.
5. (Med.)
Defn: That state of a body, or of any of its organs or parts, in which the animal functions are healthy and performed with due vigor.
Note: In this sense, the word is metaphorically applied to character or faculties, intellectual and moral; as, his mind has lost its tone.
6. (Physiol.)
Defn: Tonicity; as, arterial tone.
7. State of mind; temper; mood. The strange situation I am in and the melancholy state of public affairs, . . . drag the mind down . . . from a philosophical tone or temper, to the drudgery of private and public business. Bolingbroke. Their tone was dissatisfied, almost menacing. W. C. Bryant.