Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

moose, in zoology

(Encyclopedia)moose, largest member of the deer family, genus Alces, found in the northern parts of Eurasia and North America. The Eurasian species, A. alces, is known in Europe as the elk, a name which in North Am...

mobile, in art

(Encyclopedia)mobile mōˈbēl [key], a type of moving sculptural artwork developed by Alexander Calder in 1932 and named by Marcel Duchamp. Often constructed of colored metal pieces connected by wires or rods, the...

moccasin, in footwear

(Encyclopedia)moccasin, skin shoe worn by indigenous people of North America, excepting the sandal wearers of the Southwest area. There were two general types of moccasins, the hard-soled, which was used in the Eas...

mode, in music

(Encyclopedia)mode, in music. 1 A grouping or arrangement of notes in a scale with respect to a most important note (in the pretonal modes of Western music, this note is called the final or finalis), and the patter...

mode, in statistics

(Encyclopedia)mode, in statistics, an infrequently used type of average. In a group of numbers the mode is the number occurring most frequently. In the group 1, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 9, 9, the mode is 6 because it o...

modulation, in communications

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Modulation modulation, in communications, process in which some characteristic of a wave (the carrier wave) is made to vary in accordance with an information-bearing signal wave (the modulatin...

modulation, in music

(Encyclopedia)modulation, in music, shift in the key center of a composition. For its accomplishment use is made of the fact that each chord figures in the harmonic relationships of several keys. In modulating from...

Browse by Subject