Franklin Seaney Cooper (April 29, 1908 – February 20, 1999) was an American

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 ...

and

inventor An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an ...

who was a pioneer in speech researc

Biography

He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois where he received his undergraduate degree in physics in 1931, and received his Ph.D. in physics from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

in 1936. In 1935, with

Caryl Haskins Caryl Parker Haskins (1908–2001) was an American scientist, author, inventor, philanthropist, governmental adviser and pioneering entomologist in the study of ant biology. Along with Franklin S. Cooper, he founded the Haskins Laboratories, a ...

, he founded

Haskins Laboratories Haskins Laboratories, Inc. is an independent 501(c) non-profit corporation, founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut, since 1970. Haskins has formal affiliation agreements with both Yale University and the University of Connecticut; ...

, a nonprofit research laboratory that is located in

New Haven, Connecticut New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,02 ...

, and studied speech and language. His primary interest was in

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

and

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...

, which led him to invent the

pattern playback The pattern playback is an early talking device that was built by Dr. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues, including John M. Borst and Caryl Haskins, at Haskins Laboratories in the late 1940s and completed in 1950. There were several different ve ...

, an early electromechanical device for synthesizing speech. It became a forerunner of contemporary computer-based speech synthesis programs and was used by many scientists at Haskins to discover the critical cues for speech synthesis and recognition. Cooper designed other special-purpose synthesizers in the early 1950s, including Octopus, Voback, Intonator, and Alexander. Of these four, only the Voback and the Intonator, which were "parasitic on Homer Dudley's Vocoder", were used extensively for perceptual experiments. He was aided in the construction of these devices by the late John M. Borst. During World War II, at the request of

Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime ...

, Cooper took a position in the

Office of Scientific Research and Development The Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) was an agency of the United States federal government created to coordinate scientific research for military purposes during World War II. Arrangements were made for its creation during May 1 ...

. He also returned to Washington in 1973, when he was selected to form a panel of six expert

charged with investigating the famous 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, White House office tapes of President

Richard Nixon Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a representative and senator from California and was ...

related to the

Watergate scandal The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal in the United States involving the administration of President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974 that led to Nixon's resignation. The scandal stemmed from the Nixon administration's continual ...

br>
Cooper was the president and director of research at

from 1955 to 1975. During this period he directed and provided theoretical input and guidance to many projects, including the Haskins prototype for the

reading machine A reading machine is a piece of assistive technology that allows blind people to access printed materials. It scans text, converts the image into text by means of optical character recognition and uses a speech synthesizer to read out what it has f ...

for the blind. He also advocated a program in

electromyography Electromyography (EMG) is a technique for evaluating and recording the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles. EMG is performed using an instrument called an electromyograph to produce a record called an electromyogram. An electromyog ...

to look "upstream" in the musculature at the control of motor activity in speech. He was an early advocate of the

motor theory of speech perception The motor theory of speech perception is the hypothesis that people perceive spoken words by identifying the vocal tract gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates. It originally cl ...

. This led to a great deal of work at Haskins on the physiological mechanisms underlying the production of speech carried out under the leadership of Katherine S. Harris. Cooper had many academic positions and affiliations. He was the winner of many awards, including the

Silver Medal A silver medal in sports and other similar areas involving competition is a medal made of, or plated with, silver awarded to the second-place finisher, or runner-up, of contests or competitions such as the Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games, etc ...

from the

Acoustical Society of America The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society founded in 1929 dedicated to generating, disseminating and promoting the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. The Society is primarily a voluntary orga ...

. After stepping down as president and research director at Haskins Laboratories, he served as associate research director until 1986. After retiring, he moved to

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish language, Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree kno ...

, in 1989.

Bibliography

* Abramson, A. S. (May 2000). "Franklin S. Cooper: Pioneer and educator in speech". ''

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America The ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of acoustics. It is published by the Acoustical Society of America and the editor-in-chief is James F. Lynch (Woods Hole Oceanog ...

'', Vol. 107, #5, 2825-2826. * Franklin S. Cooper, expert on speech perception. ''

Palo Alto Weekly The ''Palo Alto Weekly'' is a weekly community newspaper in Palo Alto in the U.S. state of California. Owned by Embarcadero Media, it serves Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Portola Valley, Stanford, East Palo Alto and Los Altos Hills. It was e ...

'', March 10, 1999.
"The Secretary and the Tapes Tangle"
''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'', December 10, 1973

Selected publications

* Cooper, F. S., & Kruger, P. G. Standard in the copper spectrum in the region 80A to 650A. ''

Physical Review ''Physical Review'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1893 by Edward Nichols. It publishes original research as well as scientific and literature reviews on all aspects of physics. It is published by the American Physical S ...

'', 1933, 44, 324. * Cooper, F. S., Buchwald, C. E., Haskins, C. P., & Evans, R. D. Electron bombardment of biological materials: I. An electron tube for the production of homogeneous beams of cathode rays from one to fifteen kilovolts. '' Review of Scientific Instrumentation'', 1939, 10, 74-77. * Cooper, F. S. Spectrum analysis. ''

'', 1950, 22, 761-762. * Cooper, F. S. Guidance devices for the blind. ''

Physics Today ''Physics Today'' is the membership magazine of the American Institute of Physics. First published in May 1948, it is issued on a monthly schedule, and is provided to the members of ten physics societies, including the American Physical Society. I ...

'', 1950, 3, 6-14. * Cooper, F. S., Liberman, A. M., & Borst, J. M. The interconversion of audible and visible patterns as a basis for research in the perception of speech. ''

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Sci ...

'', 1951, 37,318-325. * Cooper, F. S., Delattre, P. C., Liberman, A. M., Borst, J. M., & Gerstman,L. J. Some experiments on the perception of synthetic speech sounds. ''

'', 1952, 24, 597-606. * Liberman, A. M., Ingemann, F., Lisker, L., Delattre, P. C., & Cooper, F. S. Minimal rules for synthesizing speech. ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'', 1959, 31, 1490-1499. * Liberman, A. M., Cooper, F. S., Harris, K. S., & MacNeilage, P. F. A motor theory of speech perception. ''Proceedings of the Speech Communication Seminar'', Stockholm, 1962. * Cooper, F. S. Toward a high-performance reading machine for the blind. In Bennet, Degan, & Spiegel (Eds.), ''Human factors in technology''. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963. * Liberman, A. M., Cooper, F. S., Shankweiler, D. P., & Studdert-Kennedy, M. Perception of the speech code. ''

Psychological Review ''Psychological Review'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal that covers psychological theory. It was established by James Mark Baldwin (Princeton University) and James McKeen Cattell (Columbia University) in 1894 as a publication vehi ...

'', 1967, 74, 431-461. * Cooper, F. S. Haskins Laboratories: Research on human communication, marine ecology, and the biochemistry of protozoa. ''

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

'', 1967, 158, 1213-1215. * Cooper, F. S., & Mattingly, I. G. Computer-controlled PCM system for investigation of dichotic speech perception. ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'', 1969, 46, 115. * Cooper, F. S., Gaitenby, J. H., Mattingly, I. G., & Umeda, N. Reading aids for the blind: A special case of machine-to-man communication. ''IEEE Transactions on Audio and Electroacoustics'', 1969, AU-17, 266-270. * Sawashima, M., Abramson, A. S., Cooper, F. S., & Lisker, L. Observing laryngeal adjustments during running speech by use of a fiberoptics system. ''Phonetica'', 1970, 22, 193-201. * Bolt, R. H., Cooper, F. S., David, E. E., Jr., Denes, P. B., Pickett, J. M., & Stevens, K. N. Speaker identification by speech spectrograms: A scientists' view of its reliability for legal purposes. ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'', 1970, 47, 597-612. * Cooper, F. S., Gaitenby, J. H., & Nye, P. W. Evolution of Reading Machines for the Blind: Haskins Laboratories' Research as a Case History. ''

Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development The ''Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development'' was a peer-reviewed open access medical journal published by the Rehabilitation Research and Development Service of the Veterans Health Administration Office of Research and Development. It ...

'', 1984, Vol. 2l, No. 1., 51-87. {{DEFAULTSORT:Cooper, Franklin S. 1908 births 1999 deaths 20th-century American inventors 20th-century American physicists Haskins Laboratories scientists Speech perception researchers MIT Department of Physics alumni Grainger College of Engineering alumni