Dear List, James L. Flanagan, one of the “greats” of 20th century speech and hearing research, passed away on August 25th. Two articles, one from the New York Times: the other from the IEEE Signal Processing Society: describe his career and accomplishments. His “Speech Analysis, Synthesis and Perception” (1965, 1972) is perhaps his best-known book, but his research spanned an extraordinarily broad spectrum of research topics. My personal favorites are: Flanagan, J. L., and Guttman, N. (1960a). "On the pitch of periodic pulses," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 32, 1308-1319. Flanagan, J. L., and Guttman, N. (1960b). "On the pitch of periodic pulses without a fundamental frequency," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 32, 1319-1328. Guttman, N., and Flanagan, J. L. (1964). "Pitch of high-pass-filtered pulse trains," J. Acoust. See. Am. 36, 757-765. which number among the most elegant experiments ever performed in pitch perception. The empirical basis of the “dominance” and “existence” regions for pitch were first demonstrated in these papers, although not referred to as such by the authors (and rarely credited with this insight in the literature). They also describe several different sources of pitch, each with different characteristics, an insight far ahead of its time. Upon Jim’s retirement from Bell Labs in 1990, he became Vice President in charge of research at Rutgers and Director of CAIP at that institution, from which he retired in 2005. I met Flanagan only a few times, but was always impressed with his courtly manner and keen intelligence. -Steve Greenberg |