Osamu Fujimura 藤村靖 (August 29, 1927 in Tokyo – March 13, 2017 in Waikoloa Beach, Hawaii) was a Japanese
physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe.
Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...
,
phonetician
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
and
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, recognized as one of the pioneers of speech science. Fujimura was also known for his influential work in the diverse field of speech-related studies including
acoustics
Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician ...
,
phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
/
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
, instrumentation techniques, speech production mechanisms, and computational/theoretical linguistics.
After getting his Doctorate of Science from
the University of Tokyo
, abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project by ...
through the research he conducted at MIT, Fujimura served as director and professor at the Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (RILP), at the University of Tokyo from 1965 to 1973. He then continued his research at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
in
Murray Hill, New Jersey
Murray Hill is an unincorporated community located within portions of both Berkeley Heights and New Providence, located in Union County in northern New Jersey, United States.
It is the longtime central location of Bell Labs (part of Nokia si ...
, in the U.S., from 1973 to 1988 as a department head, working for
Max Mathews
Max Vernon Mathews (November 13, 1926 in Columbus, Nebraska, USA – April 21, 2011 in San Francisco, CA, USA) was a pioneer of computer music.
Biography
Mathews studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and the Ma ...
. He moved his research to
Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...
where he was professor and department head for speech and hearing science. He was named
professor emeritus
''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...
in 2013. He was a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Sciences
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsi ...
.
Biography
Fujimura's career as a scientist spanned nearly three quarters of a century. He authored, co-authored or edited over 256 scientific publications covering a vast range of topics including physics, speech acoustics and articulation, phonology,
kanji
are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...
transcription methods,
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
, and more. These included 11 books and monographs, 64 journal articles, 58 articles or chapters in books, 56 proceedings articles, 42 miscellaneous writings and 25 articles in RILP.
Fujimura’s work covers all aspects of phonetics, with a focus on speech articulation, analysis of acoustic phonetics, and speech perception. Fujimura and his colleagues introduced X-ray technologies to study human articulation patterns. The X-ray macrobeam speech corpus is considered to be an important research resource for modern phonetic research. His work contributed to the foundation of modern acoustic analyses of speech sounds, especially the acoustics of nasal consonants, proposing the notion of the “anti-formant”. His work also showed that consonant-to-vowel transition is perceptually more salient than vowel-to-consonant transition. In addition to his contribution to phonetic science, he wrote a review of “Syntactic Structures” by Noam Chomsky in 1963, thereby contributing to the introduction of generative linguistics in Japan. Later in his career, he proposed a model of speech articulation called “th
C/D model, in which phonological featural specifications are “Converted” and “Distributed” to several articulators. The C/D model is an explicit theory of how mental, phonological information is mapped onto actual physiological articulatory commands. This theory is currently being pursued by a number of phoneticists.
His first position was Research Assistant at The Kobayashi Institute of Physical Research, Kokubunzi, Tokyo from 1952 – 1958. He then served as Assistant Professor at the Research Laboratory of Communication Science in the University of Electrocommunications at Chōfu, Tokyo from 1958 to 1965. From 1958 to 1961 he worked at MIT as Division of Sponsored Research staff member at the Research Laboratory of Electronics (Speech Communication Group). At MIT he was supervised by Drs. Morris Halle and K. N. Stevens. This was followed by two years (1963 – 1965) as a Guest Researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, where he was supervised by Dr. Gunnar Fant. During this time, he conducted research that contributed to the foundation of modern acoustic analyses.
He obtained his D.Sc in Physics from the University of Tokyo in 1962. Starting in 1965, he served as a professor at the Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics in the faculty of medicine at the University of Tokyo. He served as the director of the Institute between 1969 and 1973, during which time he published many important phonetic research papers. Concurrently in 1973, he also was adjunct professor, Dept. of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters, at the University of Tokyo, and also chair of the Graduate Course in Physiology (in the Division of Medicine), the University of Tokyo. It was during this time that RILP became an active research center for speech science studies, focusing on developing highly advanced techniques and tools for studying articulation of speech, including fiberoptics,
EMG (electromyography) and the X-Ray Microbeam. Some studies conducted at RILP during this time are considered to be foundational to modern phonetics science, and still cited in current phonetics papers.
In 1973, he moved to
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
in Murray Hill, NJ, USA. At Bell Labs he served as the head of the Department of Linguistics and Speech Analysis Research until 1984, the head of Department of Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence Research until 1987, and the head of Department of Artificial Intelligence Research until 1988. During this time Fujimura worked with a number of scientists and is remembered for encouraging young researchers including
Mark Liberman
Mark Yoffe Liberman is an American linguist. He has a dual appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, as Trustee Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Linguistics, and as a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Scienc ...
,
Janet Pierrehumbert
Janet Pierrehumbert (b. 1954) is Professor of Language Modelling in the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. She developed an intonational model which includes a grammar ...
,
William Poser
William J. Poser is a Canadian- American linguist who is known for his extensive work with the historical linguistics of Native American languages, especially those of the Athabascan family.
He got his B.A. from Harvard in 1979 and his Ph.D. fro ...
,
Mary Beckman
Mary Esther Beckman (born September 1953) is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Ohio State University.
Career
Beckman received her PhD from Cornell University in 1984. She was a Postdoctoral member of the technical staff in "Linguistics a ...
,
Marian Macchi
Marian may refer to:
People
* Mari people, a Finno-Ugric ethnic group in Russia
* Marian (given name), a list of people with the given name
* Marian (surname), a list of people so named
Places
* Marian, Iran (disambiguation)
* Marian, Queenslan ...
,
Sue Hertz
Sue or SUE may refer to:
Music
* Sue Records, an American record label
* ''Sue'' (album), an album by Frazier Chorus
* " Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)", a song by David Bowie
Places
* Sue Islet (Queensland), one of the Torres Straits isla ...
,
Jan Edwards
Jan, JaN or JAN may refer to:
Acronyms
* Jackson, Mississippi (Amtrak station), US, Amtrak station code JAN
* Jackson-Evers International Airport, Mississippi, US, IATA code
* Jabhat al-Nusra (JaN), a Syrian militant group
* Japanese Article Numb ...
, and
Julia Hirschberg
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Hirschberg was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for contributions to the us ...
. Fujimura’s broad vision about the entire field of linguistics is evident in his impact on post-doc researchers at Bell Labs such as
John McCarthy, a formal phonologist, and
Barbara Partee
Barbara Hall Partee (born June 23, 1940) is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass).
Biography
Born in Englewood, New Jersey, Partee grew up in the Baltimore ...
, a formal semanticist.
In 1988, Fujimura moved to the Department of Speech & Hearing Science at Ohio State University where he worked until retiring as a Professor Emeritus in 2003. During his time at OSU, he was also a Member at the Center for Cognitive Science (1988 to 2003), and a Participating Professor at the Biomedical Engineering Center (1992 to 2003). In addition he was a periodic Guest Researcher at ATR/HIP in Japan from 1992 to 1996. From 1997 to 1998 he took sabbatical leave from OSU to be a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Invitation Fellow at the Research Institute of Asian and African Languages and Cultures at the Tokyo University for Foreign Studies.
Fujimura served as a fellow for the International Institute for Advanced Studies from 2004 to 2006. It was during this time that Fujimura began to formulate the C/D model of speech articulation while mentoring researchers such as Reiner Wilhelms Tricarico, Chao-Min Wu, Donna Erickson, Kerrie Beechler Obert, Caroline Menezez, and Bryan Pardo.
After retirement from OSU, he was a researcher at the Center of Excellence (COE), Nagoya University from 2003 to 2004 working with professors K. Kakehi & F. Itakura. Fujimura then served as fellow at the International Institute for Advanced Studies, Kyoto, Japan from April 2004 to August 2006.
Fujimura believed strongly diversity and inclusion in science. Through mentorship and encouragement Fujimura aided a younger generation of speech scientists. He encouraged the young generation to “Pay it Forward” with their own junior researchers, creating a perpetual positive cycle.
Patents
As a basic researcher pioneering work on speech synthesis, Fujimura did not frequently patent his inventions.
Fujimura did patent his Speech transmission system from 1978
US 4170719 A This machine created speech synthesis with voiced and unvoiced sounds produced differently.
One of his creations was the computer-tracking-base
X-Ray microbeam systemfor recording human utterances. The first version of the machine was at University of Tokyo, built by JEOL (Nihon-Denshi KK). The second version was built at University of Wisconsin and was in use until 2009. They used extremely low doses of X-ray to track the movement of the tongue and oral chamber in order to study how humans uttered sounds. Both machines were used by generations of researchers to discover and to verify theories of human speech generation, and lead to the development of CAT scans.
Personal life
Osamu Fujimura was born August 29, 1927. The Fujimura family is descended from the Miyamoto clan (源氏), remotely related to the
samurai
were the hereditary military nobility and officer caste of medieval and early-modern Japan from the late 12th century until their abolition in 1876. They were the well-paid retainers of the '' daimyo'' (the great feudal landholders). They h ...
Minamoto Yoritomo (源頼朝), who founded the
Kamakura Bakufu
The was the feudal military government of Japan during the Kamakura period from 1185 to 1333. Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005)"''Kamakura-jidai''"in ''Japan Encyclopedia'', p. 459.
The Kamakura shogunate was established by Minamoto no ...
(military government site) as a
Shōgun
, officially , was the title of the military dictators of Japan during most of the period spanning from 1185 to 1868. Nominally appointed by the Emperor, shoguns were usually the de facto rulers of the country, though during part of the Kamakur ...
(将軍) in the 12th century. Yoritomo's grave is behind the Hachimangu 八幡宮 in Yukinoshita,
Kamakura
is a city in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan.
Kamakura has an estimated population of 172,929 (1 September 2020) and a population density of 4,359 persons per km² over the total area of . Kamakura was designated as a city on 3 November 1939.
Kamak ...
. He was survived by his second wife J.C. Williams, and four sons, Akira,
Makoto
is a unisex Japanese name although it is more commonly used by males.
As a noun, Makoto means "sincerity" (誠) or "truth" (真, 眞).
People
Given name
* Makoto (musician) (born 1977), drum and bass artist
*Makoto (Sharan Q) ( まこと), ...
, Wataru, and Itaru.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fujimura, Osamu
1927 births
2017 deaths
Japanese scientists
Phoneticians
Ohio State University faculty
Japanese expatriates in the United States
Linguists of Japanese
Academic staff of the University of Tokyo
Scientists at Bell Labs
Scientists from Tokyo