Study of speech and hearing at Bell Telephone Laboratories: The Fletcher years
Christine M. Rankovic · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2001
During the first half of the twentieth century, Bell Telephone Laboratories carried out an extensive research program aimed at improving the intelligibility of speech transmitted over the telephone. Harvey Fletcher, a founding member and the first president of the Acoustical Society, led this effort. The contributions of Fletcher and his colleagues helped produce not only the world’s leading telephone system, but also established the speech and hearing sciences field. A compact disk (CD/ROM) containing nearly 10 000 pages of recently discovered Bell Labs internal research documents dating from this era (1917–1933) is now available from the Acoustical Society. The majority of the documents are concise scientific reports that reveal the extraordinary thinking and insights of these world-class researchers. In addition to their historical significance, the documents also provide technical insight and clarity on topics of current interest to speech and hearing scientists. The discussion will include an overview of CD/ROM contents and a focused discussion on documents pertaining to speech intelligibility measurement and prediction.