Dedication to Johan E. F. Sundberg.

Abstract

Johan Sundberg: Eminent pioneer in voice sciences, longstanding scientist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology with a personal Chair in Musical Acoustics; author of the seminal book The Science of the Voice and over 200 articles on singing; mentor and role model to dozens of students; sought after speaker; honored for scholarship, leadership, and inspirational passion for ideas. We dedicate to him this special double issue (Volume 21, No. 1 & No. 2) of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind & Brain entitled Singing and Psychomusicology. Johan Sundberg was born in 1936 in Sweden. A lifelong fascination with music acoustics emerged in his youth. Creative, curiosity-driven and interested in music and mathematics, he built a small pipe organ before the end of high school. His focus eventually changed from pipes of the organ to those of the singing voice. He obtained his university education at Uppsala University, one of the most influential universities in Scandinavia (and the oldest, founded in 1477) where he studied philosophy, aesthetics, math and musicology. In 1966, he received a doctoral degree in musicology on the acoustics of organ flue pipes. He also studied organ and liturgical music, leading to a cantor's degree. For over 20 years he sang in the Stockholm (Adolf Fredrik's) Bach Choir, and he served as its president for more than half of that time. He studied voice with the renowned Dagmar Gustafson between 1963 to 1988 and presented his one and only public solo concert on his 50th birthday. BEGINNINGS: KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY When writing his Ph.D. thesis on organ pipes, for Uppsala University, Johan Sundberg was in need of expert guidance in acoustical engineering and measurements. He made his way to the Speech Transmission Laboratory at Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan (KTH) in Stockholm, then headed by the great pioneer in speech communication, Gunnar Fant. (KTH in Sweden might be compared to MIT in the United States; it is at the same time responsible for one-third of Sweden's capacity for engineering studies and technical research at the post-secondary level). There Johan found Frasse Fransson, co-inventor with Erik Jansson of the Ionophone. Frasse, a retired engineer and a passionate flute player, had been welcomed by Gunnar Fant to pursue his interest in the acoustics of musical instruments at the KTH lab; and now he introduced Johan to the physics of music. Gunnar Fant saw Johan's special interests in the acoustics of singing and his application of the source-filter theory as a valuable contribution to the lab's activities. Indeed, much of Johan's work was highly relevant to speech, such as the APEX project on articulatory models with Bjorn Lindblom, that is still being developed today. Gunnar Fant soon recognized Sundberg's significance and potential in music acoustics, and in 1968 he encouraged Johan to develop a research group of his own. Johan began then to publish on his discoveries related to the singer's formant. Over the next decade he also published a textbook on musical acoustics that was later translated into English (Sundberg, 1991). In 1973 he initiated an annual series of intensive day-long seminars on music acoustics open to the Swedish public and leading to a series of nine edited volumes. This series is now available on-line (http://www.speech.kth.se/ music/publications/kma/), thanks to the initiative of Anders Friberg and Johan's other colleagues in the KTH Music Acoustics Group, who produced the collection in honor of Johan's 70th birthday in 2006. Sten Ternstrom, who followed Johan Sundberg as Head of the KTH Music Acoustics Group, said in the foreword to the collection: Johan Sundberg's contributions to science are extensive and profound. With hundreds of articles, books and prizes to his credit, he has long been recognised as a world authority on voice science and music acoustics. Significantly, his devotion to his discipline is coupled with a deep and generous commitment to its wide dissemination, not only among peers, but also to the interested public. …