Muscles alive!
Katherine Safford Harris · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2000
As the Haskins work on speech perception revealed the importance of the contribution to speech perception of time-varying aspects of the acoustic signal, Frank Cooper began a search for techniques to make detailed studies of the dynamic aspects of articulation. While some important work using cinefluorography, by Moll and his associates, had appeared in the 1960s, increasing concern about the hazards of radiation exposure severely limited the collection of substantial bodies of data by such a means. Frank suggested that recording the muscle signals underlying articulator movement, using the techniques suggested by Basmajian for various nonarticulatory systems, might have important advantages. To solve the problem of recording from tongue surfaces, he developed a suction electrode system. However, a later collaboration with researchers from the University of Tokyo using hooked wire electrodes provided better isolation of muscle fiber groups with complex relations to articulator surfaces. This work has led to present day modeling of the relationship of muscles to movement, although substantial problems remain for the work of future generations.