Sound

Find the SoundListening to words said clearly in isolation sharpens a child's ability to attend selectively to sounds. The activity below will help your child understand that sounds have position in words. Help your child learn to listen attentively to everyday sounds, too (the wind, a telephone ringing, footsteps in the hall). Ability to listen helps your child in getting ready to follow oral directions and develop the phoneme awareness skills needed in learning to read.To PlayTake three paper cups and label one with the word "beginning," one with the word "middle" and the third with the word "end."

Dwight YoakamLong Way Home (Reprise 46918)Despite his considerable skills as an actor, Dwight Yoakam is hardly the sort anyone would cast as a country music radical. If anything, he seems quite the opposite, having come up as a dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist, a singer who could easily have passed for his generation's Buck Owens.In a weird way, though, it's Yoakam's devotion to country music's past that ends up making him seem too radical. Because unlike much of the music made in today's Nashville, which uses contemporary pop polish to make country music seem as consistent and dependable as any fast-food burger, the down-home sound Yoakam delivers on "Long Way Home" is as tangy and distinctive as grits in gravy.

There's almost something patriotic about the notion of Americana. Drawing from roots-oriented strains of country, folk, blues and rock, the sound is as American as apple pie.But you don't have to be American to play it.Indeed, some of the most interesting variations on the American approach can be found north of the border, thanks to bands like Cowboy Junkies. Like fellow Canadians Blue Rodeo, Spirit of the West and the Waltons, the Junkies are intimately familiar with Americana's musical vocabulary.

Use a shopping catalog such as J.C. Penny or Sears. Tell your child you are going on a shopping trip. Have him select an item, such as a television, and ask him, "What sound does television begin with?"You can do the same with other items, and every time he gives the correct sound, he gets to cut out and keep that object. When he does not know a sound, tell him, "Television begins with the sound 't'." Try not to say a vowel after the sound, in other words say 't' not 'tuh.' Praise him for the sounds he does give correctly.

SAN FRANCISCO -- It all began with three of us Baby Boomers trying to describe the sound of a Zippo lighter to a 12-year-old."Oh, I miss that sound," said Stephen."

When you first hear those familiar words, you snap your head around as if there were someone else in the room."Take that out of your mouth. You don't know where it has been."Who said that? Did I say that?It is as if you were a ventriloquist's dummy. Or possessed by demons who have stolen your voice. You recognize the words, but not the person speaking them."You're going to put somebody's eye out with that thing."Nothing conscious precedes these words. They spill out of your mouth without a thought behind them.

Los Angeles -- There's an episode of the old "Batman" TV series in which a villain ties Robin to the clapper of a giant clock bell. When the clock is to toll at midnight, the sheer cacophony of the ensuing gonging is supposed to spell a particularly gruesome auditory doom for the Boy Wonder.Not to suggest that the makers of "Batman Forever" have plotted the same fate for moviegoers, but certainly, if you see and hear the movie in the right theater, the experience can be akin to hanging out in that bell with the Caped Crusader's hapless sidekick.

These days, jazz is crawling with would-be prodigies, young musicians who have albums in the stores before they're even out of their teens. The trouble is that too many of them mistake proficiency for profundity, and end up trying to set their own course before they're really sure of what it is they have to say.That's one reason it's a relief to come across Ron Holloway. Because unlike so many players, who would cut an album of their own at the earliest opportunity, Holloway waited for almost two decades before recording "Slanted," his solo debut.

Alienation is a funny thing. When New Order first came to prominence in the mid '80s, it owed most of its audience to a shared sense of estrangement. Some of that had to do with what the songs said, but mostly it was a reflection of how they sounded -- of the emptiness evoked by their affectless vocals, thrumming guitars and insistent beat.At first, New Order's all-tension/no-release approach made it an anomaly on the dance music scene. But as time passed, not only were New Order's ideas absorbed into the mainstream, but the group itself was beginning to cross over, cracking the Top 40 in this country and topping the singles chart in its native Britain.

If there's a computer user in your house, or your whole household uses the computer, you'll never have to worry about finding the perfect Christmas gift. There's a program or gadget out there for everyone.One of the neat things about writing a computer column is that I get to try out a lot of them, and as the holidays approach I like to share my favorites. Some of these are new and state of the art, and some are old stand-bys. On the gadget front, my first recommendation is that you treat yourself and your computer to a multimedia upgrade, if you don't already have one. This is a pretty big gift, but it's worth it. A multimedia kit consists of a CD-ROM drive and a sound board for IBM-compatibles and a CD-ROM alone for Apple Macintosh computers, which come factory-equipped with sound capabilities.

I'm 65," says Kiri Te Kanawa, the golden-toned, New Zealand-born soprano. "I can't say the voice sounds like it did at 35. But as long as I do music that suits me, I'm fine. If you're a size 12 you don't try to wear a size 8, do you? You'd look very stupid." Te Kanawa, whose flair for straight talking is as much a part of her persona as her ever-glamorous appearance, will give a recital at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society.

Think of the loudest event you've ever attended. A Metallica concert? A monster-truck rally? Bike Week in Daytona Beach? Please, that's kid stuff. Now imagine that noise sustained for three hours and you have football at the charming Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, where hearing goes to die and where the Ravens play the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday. Hey, Joe Flacco: Good luck calling signals when thousands of beer-swilling Vikings fans get wound up and the noise literally bounces off the Teflon-coated roof and around the tight concrete wasteland below.

We were at a Gilbert family reunion a few years ago, and someone evidently married someone who is Scottish, or has some Scottish in his family, or who likes Scotch, and bingo. Bagpipes appeared. First of all, is it a bagpipe, or is it bagpipes? I'm going to refer to it as a bagpipes because while it is clearly just one instrument, we must acknowledge that it certainly sounds like a whole lot more. Anyway, at our final formal family reunion dinner, in sashayed one of the family members, playing a bagpipes.

Putting this week's sports media notes into focus while realizing that the news of ESPN/ABC's plan to televise the Winter X Games in high definition probably isn't the nudge that is going to put an HD television in the Frager household: Once upon a time - like when ESPN used to carry it - you wouldn't go 43 minutes into a SportsCenter without a mention of the NHL when it was in season. But such was the case Wednesday night, when that was the amount of time that went by on the late show before the first hockey highlights.

"All digital sound" proclaims the ad for the cutting-edge multiplex Muvico, right under "all stadium seating" and "valet parking." State-of-the-art sound has long been a selling-point for mall moviegoers who want to savor the subterranean bass in a hard-driving rock score or the cymbal-like crashes in a car chase. But pristine audio is actually more important to art-film lovers, because the nuance of a sophisticated comedy or drama can occur in a tone or an inflection, a tense whisper or a mumbled wisecrack.

You have a decision to make when it comes to choosing a wireless earpiece: Do I want to look good or sound good? Because in tests of four new Bluetooth earpieces, which allow for a wireless connection between your ear and your phone, the one with the highest geek factor also happened to have the best voice quality for the person at the other end of the call. And the one that looked best in the ear - also the most comfortable - sounded like I was talking in a tunnel. Hence, it's a matter of how you look versus how you sound.

No one ever accused Rufus Wainwright of having a taste for understatement. The singer staked his reputation on constructing pop songs that sound like they were meant to be bellowed at the Met. Frilly orchestrations, soaring choruses and high-strung lyrics run rampant in his music. He's no different in conversation. Talk to Wainwright about his new Album, Release the Stars, and he'll blithely declare it "an Olympic feat." Get into his personal life and he'll describe himself, by turns, as being "a romantic Victorian poet, heartbreaker-type" and "a Judy Garland opera queen."

Marketers around the world are using innovative audio technology that sends sound in a narrow beam, just like light, making it possible to direct messages right into consumers' ears while they shop or sit in waiting rooms. The audio spotlight device, created by Holosonic Research Labs Inc. of Watertown, Mass., has been used to hawk everything from cereals in supermarket aisles to glasses at doctor's offices. The messages are often quick and targeted - and a little creepy to the uninitiated.

In yesterday morning's lecture on solid mechanics, all was quiet except for the sound of Professor Liviu Librescu's voice. Then came the gunshots - in the classroom next door. In an instant, Virginia Tech's Norris Hall, a building dedicated to the science of engineering, was torn apart by the worst shooting rampage in modern U.S. history. Junior Richard Mallalieu said he and about 20 classmates instantly dropped to the floor, ducking under and behind desks for what sounded like the first 10 shots.

Nothing improves the performance of an iPod, or any other portable music player, more than great headphones. I've been testing the newest headphones from Shure Inc. and if you have the money for the luxurious E500PTH, spend it. It blows away the sound you get from Apple's iPod headphones, and it makes Shure's E3c headphones, the last set I tested from the company, seem like a product from an inferior rival. But $500 is a steep price for this sonic improvement, double the price of some iPods.