Licklider Pitch

["Richard F. Lyon" <DickLyon@xxxxxxx>]

Title: Licklider Pitch

Last night at the Computer History Museum, my friend Ivan Sutherland gave a talk on "Reseach and Fun," which he dedicated to J. C. R. Licklider:

http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?view=previous&section=calendar

(there should be a video there eventually).

"Lick" was Ivan's predecessor as head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of the U. S. DoD's ARPA, in the early 1960s.  Both of them and their successors, including the third director, Bob Taylor, who was also at the talk last night, were instrumental in funding the research the led to the ARPANET, the Internet as we know it today, and tons of other good work.

See: http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_ipto.htm or http://memex.org/licklider.html

Ivan told some stories about Lick and others, but didn't touch on Lick's AUDITORY past.  Hopefully all of you know of Licklider's 1951 "Duplex Theory of Pitch Perception," which augments the dimension of cochlear place with an autocorrelation lag dimension.

So I have my own Lick story to relate:  About 1983, I attended a U. S. Navy workshop on "Artificial Intelligence and Bionics" in Stowe, Vermont.  During my talk, where I showed the first ever animation of an auditory autocorrelogram (Lick's theory), he fell asleep against the back wall of the room full of government and academic types (and a few of us in industry); fortunately, his wife was there, and elbowed him to wake him up when I mentioned his work.  Anyway, he liked what he saw, and we had a good laugh together.

I hereby second the pitch that Lick is to be remembered.

Dick