Abstract:

Although the preponderance of Dix Ward's work was in the area of the effects of noise on hearing, his paper on tonal monaural displacusis [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 27, 365--372 (1955)] has always been my favorite from among all of his papers. In this paper, published several years after he had completed his work at Harvard and was being introduced to noise-induced hearing loss through the Central Institute for the Deaf, he performed a consummate study of his own tonal monaural displacusis and that of a woman who was studying music at Harvard. Not only did he specify their diplacuses exhaustively, his conclusions from that study foretold of many future developments in psychoacoustics, hearing loss, tinnitus, and signal analysis. The import of this monumental work will be iterated.