Franklin S. Cooper: Pioneer and educator in speech research

Abstract

Helped by the post-war availability of the sound spectrograph, invented at Bell Laboratories, rapid progress was made in the 1950s in acquiring an understanding of the acoustics of speech. As head of the Haskins Laboratories, then in New York City, Franklin Cooper developed a rich interdisciplinary environment for research into the information-bearing elements (the cues) embedded in the speech signal. For him this was not only important basic research but also, as he sought to convince engineers, an indirect but vital approach to speech compression and processing. Cooper was also an educational pioneer as a teacher of the new acoustic phonetics to graduate students concerned with language but with little formal background in physics and higher mathematics. This began with his appointment as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Columbia University. Later, with the move of the Laboratories to New Haven, Connecticut, he oversaw the forming of links with the University of Connecticut and Yale University, which allowed for the formal participation of faculty members and a number of their graduate students in research at Haskins. Cooper’s influence was deeply felt not only by academic colleagues but also by students of linguistics, psychology, and speech and hearing.