F.V. Hunt and my travels with fricative consonants

Abstract

My training as an electrical engineer aligned well with the way acoustics of speech was modeled, as I learned when working at Bell Laboratories and then in Ken Stevens’ lab at MIT. However, fricative consonants require turbulence noise for their production; studying them for my Ph.D. led me toward aeroacoustics and testing whether circuit models really were adequate for modeling fricatives. The 1984–1985 Hunt and the NATO 1985–1986 postdoctoral fellowships gave me two years in which to learn more. I studied flow measurement methods at MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department (supervised by Prof. Richard Lyon), then used them in experiments on mechanical models of fricatives and of vocal folds at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) at the University of Southampton, UK (supervised by Dr. Stephen Elliott and Dr. Phil Nelson). At the Department of Speech Communication and Music Acoustics at KTH, Stockholm, Sweden, supervised by Prof. Gunnar Fant, I analyzed human speech and experimented with v...