Harvey Fletcher's role in the creation of communication acoustics

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Volumn 99, Issue 4 I, 1996, Pages 1825-1839

  Allen, Jont B ^a  

^a AT AND T LABS RESEARCH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ACOUSTICS; ARTICLE; HEARING; HISTORY; HUMAN; PHYSICS; PUBLIC FIGURE; SPEECH; TELEPHONE; UNITED STATES;

ACOUSTICS; FAMOUS PERSONS; HEARING; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; PHYSICS; SPEECH; TELEPHONE; UNITED STATES;

EID: 0030117489     PISSN: 00014966     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1121/1.415364     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. In January of 1912 Fritz Lowenstein demonstrated to Bell officials De Forest's audion amplifier. Within a year a project was organized under Arnold to study the device to see if it could be made practical. Arnold saw the blue glowing gas inside the tube, and realized that the tube would work better when evacuated. A vacuum pump was imported from Germany for this purpose (Fagen, 1975, p. 260).
2. Wegel and Lane (1924) had previously published a key paper where they described the theory of the cochlea using a tapered electrical transmission line model.
3. This paper won a Gold Medal from the Franklin Institute. The same paper was also published in the Bell System Technical Journal (Fletcher, 1992d).
4. During this effort, the first low- and high-pass filters having sharp cutoff frequencies were designed by Crandall, Wente, Johnson, and McKown, based on the theory of G.A. Campbell, the first mathematician at Bell Labs. This theory and practice became the basis for network theory. Vacuum tube amplifiers were just coming into limited use. Microphones and receivers required entirely new designs. Campbell was also the first to suggest experimental articulation methods (Campbell, 1910; Fletcher, 1947). Thus a great deal of effort was devoted to these early articulation studies.
5. The term "declassified" was not an official AT&T designation. "Company private" would have been a more appropriate term than "classified."
6. In Fletcher (1992) it states that Fletcher was under the general supervision of the Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and charged with groups at Harvard and other universities. He received a citation signed by President Harry S. Truman for this work.
7. See Hellman and Hellman (1990) for an interesting discussion of the relation between the intensity jnd and the loudness growth.
8. The repetition of this experiment would make a nice lab problem for students.
9. One must learn to ignore the large difference in pitch, and concentrate on the difference in loudness.
10. Fletcher knew that the loudness of a subcritical-band random signal depends only on its energy, as shown in their narrow-band loudness data (Fletcher and Munson, 1937, Fig. 11).
11. At high levels the masking power slightly decreases with increasing level (Fletcher and Munson, 1937, Fig. 17), (French and Steinberg, 1947, Fig. 8). This change could either be a degradation in signal processing ability, or an increase in the filter bandwidth with increased level. The latter seems more likely.
12. C/10. In all of Fletcher's work, C was expressed in terms of a percent of L.
13. Why did they not discuss or reference Fletcher's argument or derivation, or most of his relevant papers?
14. J.C. Steinberg and W. Munson played critical roles in this history, but Fletcher was the intellectual force.
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