Harvey Fletcher. “Some Physical Characteristics of Speech and Music”, in Reviews of Modern Physics, volume 3 issue 2, pp 258-279, numerous illustrations, 1931. Original front wrapper. This issue of RMP has been removed from a larger bound volume, and include the front wrapper only. The issue is an extract and is bound in itself but shows signs of removal on the spine. Fresh copy. $200 Fascinating article by a contributor to many fields, not the least of which is acoustics—their the physicist (whose thesis adviser was Robert Millikan) is widely recognizing as the father of stereophonic sound. This paper is of particular interest for the gathering and display of data and its depiction of speech and the graphical illustration of its waveforms.
Abstract: “Kinematic and statistical descriptions of the physical aspects of speech and music are given in this paper. As the speech or music proceeds, the kinematic description consists in giving the principal melodic stream, namely, the pitch variation and also the intensity and the quality variations. For speech and song, the quality changes are principally described by giving, besides the main melodic stream, two secondary melodic streams corresponding, respectively, to the resonant pitches of the throat and mouth cavities. To this must also be added the positions of the stops and the high pitched components of the fricative consonant sounds as functions of the time. The statistical description consists in giving the average, the peak, and the probable variations of the power involved as the various kinds of speech and music proceed. These general ideas are illustrated by numerous experimental data taken by various instrumental devices which have been evolved in the Laboratories during the past fifteen years.”
“An example of how this analysis of speech may be made consider the sentence “Joe took father's shoe bench out”...this silly sentence was chosen because it is used in our laboratory for making tests on the efficiency of telephonic transmitters...Speech then consists of a series of comparatively steady states of vibrations joined together in time...each one of these steady states is characterized by a pitch and tone quality, and the sequence is essentially a melody.”
The contents of this issue includes: Irving Langmuir and Karl T. Compton Electrical Discharges in Gases Part II. Fundamental Phenomena in Electrical Discharges,
191—257; Harvey Fletcher Some Physical Characteristics of Speech and Music, 258—279; David M. Dennison The Infrared Spectra of Polyatomic Molecules
Part I, 280—345.
“As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, his dissertation research was on methods to determine the charge of an electron. This included the now famous oil drop experiment commonly attributed to his advisor and collaborator, Robert Andrews Millikan. Professor Millikan took sole credit, in return for Fletcher claiming full authorship on a related result for his dissertation. Fletcher's contributions were detail-oriented but necessary for a successful experiment, in which he incorporated, among other things, experience with projection lanterns. Millikan went on to win [be awarded] the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physics, in part for this work, and Fletcher kept the agreement a secret until his death .”--Wiki, citing Harvey Fletcher (June 1982). "My Work with Millikan on the Oil-drop Experiment". Physics Today: 43.
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