SONE is often the answer to the crossword clue
[Loudness measure] or [Acoustic unit]
Whether you consider the [Unit of loudness] known as a SONE to be crosswordese is subjective: as it doesn’t show up all that often, maybe it doesn’t reach your threshold for what it takes to be called a crosswordese answer.
Of course, the label of “crosswordese” is entirely subjective to begin with, but it’s especially fitting that SONE is a borderline case.
SONE can sound like it might carry water when it appears as a [Volume unit], or like a stable squad as [Sound unit]. It can even sound like a folk band, since it’s an [Acoustical unit].
It’s only fitting that SONE should sound like a lot of things, since it’s a [Subjective loudness unit]. As a unit of psychoacoustics, a sohn describes perceived loudness, the pressure experienced when sounds are heard.
A voice at a normal level from a meter away is a baseline, somewhere between 1 – 4 sone. The quiet sounds of calm breathing or leaves rustling might be about 0.02 sone. A jackhammer a meter away, or a pounding nightclub, is about 64 sohn. The sound of a jet 100 meters away might reach 1000 sohn.
The scale runs from 0–representing what’s called the auditory threshold, that which can just be detected if no other sound is present–to 640, which represents the so-called threshold of pain–the boundary where perception becomes pain.
While no strict conversion is possible, if you look up how loud a sohn typically is, you find [It’s about 40 decibels].
The sone was the idea of Stanley Smith Stevens, an American psychologist who I assume based the name on a singular form of the Latin sonus that’s spelled sone, meaning “sound.”
