The reference

All twenty-six, and what each one actually is.

Column three is what you read to her. Column four is what it means, and is printed at the back of the book, for the adult who has been reading it aloud for three years and has started to wonder.

Hear them Get the book

	Word	Read aloud	What it actually is
A	Amp	The box that makes it loud.	An amplifier takes a signal too small to hear and adds power to it without changing its shape.
B	Bass	So low you feel it in your tummy.	Frequencies below about 250 hertz. Below roughly 20 hertz you stop hearing them and start feeling them.
C	Crossfader	Slide it there, then slide it back.	One fader, two channels. It turns one down as it turns the other up; scratch DJs cut with the first millimetre of its travel.
D	Dubplate	One record, cut for one night only.	A one-off record cut on a lathe into a soft lacquer-coated disc. It sounds glorious and wears out fast, in tens of plays rather than hundreds.
E	Echo	It says it, then says it smaller.	A delayed copy of a sound. Set the delay to the right interval and the repeats fall in step with the beat.
F	Fader	Push it up and the sound gets bigger.	A slider that sets level. Audio faders are logarithmic, because human hearing is.
G	Gain	The same sound, quiet then louder.	How much a signal is amplified before anything else touches it. Set it wrong at the start and nothing downstream can fix it.
H	Hi-hat	Two little cymbals kissing.	Two cymbals on a stand, opened and closed by a pedal. In house and techno the open hat lands between the beats, which is what makes you nod.
I	Intro	The quiet bit before the loud bit.	The opening section, kept plain so it can be slid in underneath the record already playing. Usually a bare drum pattern, thirty-two bars long.
J	Jack	The little hole the wire goes into.	The socket a plug pushes into. The name comes from telephone switchboards in the 1870s, where an operator connected your call by pushing a plug into a jack.
K	Kick	The big heartbeat under everything.	The bass drum. In house and techno it lands on every beat; four kicks to the bar is where four on the floor comes from.
L	Loop	The bit that comes round again.	A section of audio set to repeat seamlessly. Put the start and the end on the beat and the join disappears.
M	Monitor	The speaker that tells the truth.	A speaker built to be accurate rather than flattering. If a mix holds up on a monitor it should hold up anywhere.
N	Needle	It listens to the little groove.	The stylus. A diamond tip a few hundredths of a millimetre wide, riding a groove and turning wiggles into voltage.
O	Oscillator	Where every sound is born.	A circuit that repeats a waveform at a chosen frequency. Every synthesised sound starts as one.
P	Pitch	The note goes up, and up.	How high or low a note is; the frequency of the wave. Double the frequency and you have gone up one octave.
Q	Queue	The next record, waiting its turn.	The record you have lined up to play next. Its twin, spelled cue, is the headphone channel that lets you hear it before anyone else can; same sound, different word, different job.
R	Reverb	The sound of a very big room.	Thousands of reflections arriving just after the sound itself. The bigger the room, the longer they take to die away.
S	Snare	The clap on two and on four.	A drum with wires stretched under the lower head. They rattle when it is struck, which is why it cuts through everything.
T	Tempo	One, two, three, four.	The speed of the music, counted in beats per minute. Most techno sits between 125 and 140.
U	Unison	Two of the same, side by side.	Two or more voices playing the same note. Detune them very slightly and the sound gets wider.
V	Vinyl	A black circle full of music.	A spiral groove pressed into plastic. The wiggles in the wall of the groove are the waveform itself, at actual size.
W	Wave	Every sound is really a wave.	Sound is air pressure rising and falling. Draw that over time and you have drawn the sound.
X	XLR	The cable with three little pins.	A three-pin connector carrying a balanced signal, so it can run a long way without picking up hum.
Y	Y-cable	One goes in and two come out.	A splitter. One signal in, two out, so two things can hear the same source.
Z	Zero	Where loud has to stop.	The mark on a level meter where the signal is as loud as it can get before it distorts.

Why these words

They are real. A child who learns oscillator at four has learned a thing that exists, and the word will still be true at twenty. A one-year-old learns dubplate as easily as dog; the syllables are the same work.
They cover the sound space. The twenty-six between them carry most of the English consonant inventory in initial position, which is what makes the third register work when she gets to it.
The adult can bear them. You will read this several hundred times. A book the adult avoids produces no turns at all, and the turns are the entire mechanism¹.

How to say them

Letter names are meaningless at twelve months. A single word, said on its own with a pause after it, is not. Say the word, then stop and wait longer than feels natural; the gap is where her turn goes. The full ladder, with the reasoning and the sources, is on the method page.

Two ways to use this list tonight, for nothing

The alphabet on screen plays a synthesised sound for each word and can read them aloud in whichever of the four registers matches her age. It waits for a tap and never autoplays, because toddlers learn words from a screen only when the screen responds to them². Lights is the ambient half: slow visuals for a screen in the room while a mix plays, tied to bars rather than beats.

On screens, plainly

The WHO advises no screen time at all for children under one, and very little under five; the AAP's position on the under-twos is similar, with video chat the named exception. We agree with them. The screen version exists for the times you are not in the same room as her, and it is meant to be used with an adult, not instead of one. The printed book is the product. Both guidelines are quoted in full →

Sources on this page

1Beyond the 30-Million-Word Gap: Children's Conversational Exposure Is Associated With Language-Related Brain FunctionRomeo et al., Psychological Science, 2018
doi.org/10.1177/0956797617742725
2Skype Me! Socially Contingent Interactions Help Toddlers Learn LanguageRoseberry, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, Child Development, 2014
doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12166