harshness

1 the roughness of a substance that causes abrasions [syn: abrasiveness, scratchiness]

2 harsh or rough to the ear [syn: roughness]

3 the quality of being cruel and causing tension or annoyance [syn: cruelty, cruelness]

4 excessive sternness; "severity of character"; "the harshness of his punishment was inhuman"; "the rigors of boot camp" [syn: severity, rigor, rigour, inclemency, hardness, stiffness]

English

Etymology

harsh +-ness

Noun

1. The quality of being harsh.

   1891 ''And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means towards the aims, of to-day towards yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles'', Part 6.

otheruses Harsh Harshness, in music information retrieval, is a Non-Contextual Low-Level Audio Descriptors (NLDs) that represents one dimension of the multi-dimensional psychoacoustic feature called as musical timbre.

Classical timbre’ NLDs are roughness, spectral centroid, and spectral flux. While harmonicity and inharmonicity can also be considered NLDs, harshness differs from them, as well as from roughness, once it reckons for a distinguished perceptual audio feature expressed by the summary spectral periodicity. This feature is especially clear in single-pitch, single-note, musical audio, where the timbre of two different musical instruments can greatly differ in levels of harshness (e.g., the difference in harshness between a flute and a saxophone is evident). As it is supposed to be, harshness is independent of all others NLDs.

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