Franklin S. Cooper
Encyclopedia
Franklin Seaney Cooper was an American physicist
and inventor
who was a pioneer in speech research.http://www.haskins.yale.edu/staff/fsc.html
where he received his undergraduate degree in physics in 1931, and received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
in 1936. In 1935, along with Caryl Haskins he founded Haskins Laboratories
, a nonprofit research laboratory that is presently located in New Haven, Connecticut
, and currently studies speech and language. His primary interest was in speech synthesis
and perception
, which led him to invent the Pattern playback
, 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, where 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
, Cooper took a position in the Office of Scientific Research and Development
. He also returned to Washington in 1973, when he was selected to form a panel of six experts http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/forensic.audio/watergate.tapes.introduction.html charged with investigating the famous 18-minute gap in the White House office tapes
of President Richard Nixon
related to the Watergate scandal
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/community_pulse/1999_Mar_10.LEADOBIT.html.
Frank Cooper was the President and Director of Research at Haskins Laboratories
from 1955-1975. During this period type he directed and provided theoretical input and guidance to many projects, including the Haskins prototype for the reading machine
for the blind. He also advocated a program in electromyography
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
. 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
.
Frank Cooper had many academic positions and affiliations. He was the winner of many awards, including the Silver Medal from the Acoustical Society of America
. 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
in 1989.
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
and inventor
American Inventor
American Inventor is a reality television series based on a competition to be named America's best inventor. It was conceived by UK entrepreneur Peter Jones, who appears on the British version of the somewhat similar programme Dragons' Den, a format originated in Japan where it is owned by Sony....
who was a pioneer in speech research.http://www.haskins.yale.edu/staff/fsc.html
Biography
He attended the University of IllinoisUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
where he received his undergraduate degree in physics in 1931, and received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
in 1936. In 1935, along with Caryl Haskins he founded Haskins Laboratories
Haskins Laboratories
Haskins Laboratories is an independent, international, multidisciplinary community of researchers conducting basic research on spoken and written language. Founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut since 1970, Haskins Laboratories is a private, non-profit research institute with a...
, a nonprofit research laboratory that is presently located in New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...
, and currently studies speech and language. His primary interest was in speech synthesis
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...
and perception
Speech perception
Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology...
, which led him to invent the Pattern playback
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 versions of this hardware device. Only one currently...
, 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, where 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
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
, Cooper took a position in the Office of Scientific Research and Development
Office of Scientific Research and Development
The Office of Scientific Research and Development 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 1941, and it was created formally by on June 28, 1941...
. He also returned to Washington in 1973, when he was selected to form a panel of six experts http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/forensic.audio/watergate.tapes.introduction.html charged with investigating the famous 18-minute gap in the White House office tapes
Watergate tapes
The Watergate tapes, a subset of the Nixon tapes, are a collection of recordings of conversations between Richard Nixon and his fellow conspirators plotting a break in to the Watergate Hotel. U.S. President Richard Nixon and various White House staff started communicating on February 1971 and...
of President Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
related to the Watergate scandal
Watergate scandal
The Watergate scandal was a political scandal during the 1970s in the United States resulting from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and the Nixon administration's attempted cover-up of its involvement...
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/community_pulse/1999_Mar_10.LEADOBIT.html.
Frank Cooper was the President and Director of Research at Haskins Laboratories
Haskins Laboratories
Haskins Laboratories is an independent, international, multidisciplinary community of researchers conducting basic research on spoken and written language. Founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut since 1970, Haskins Laboratories is a private, non-profit research institute with a...
from 1955-1975. During this period type he directed and provided theoretical input and guidance to many projects, including the Haskins prototype for the reading machine
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 found....
for the blind. He also advocated a program in electromyography
Electromyography
Electromyography 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 electromyograph detects the electrical potential generated by muscle...
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
Motor theory of speech perception
thumb|250px|right|When we hear [[speech|spoken words]] we sense that they are made of auditory [[sound]]s. The motor theory of speech perception argues that behind the sounds we hear are the intended movements of the [[vocal tract]] that [[pronunciation|pronounces]] them.The motor theory of speech...
. 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
Katherine Safford Harris
Katherine S. Harris is a noted psychologist and speech scientist. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Speech and Hearing at the CUNY Graduate Center and a member of the Board of Directors of Haskins Laboratories. She is also the former President of the Acoustical Society of America and Vice...
.
Frank Cooper had many academic positions and affiliations. He was the winner of many awards, including the Silver Medal from the Acoustical Society of America
Acoustical Society of America
The Acoustical Society of America is an international scientific society dedicated to increasing and diffusing the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications.-History:...
. 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, California
Palo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, United States. The city shares its borders with East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park. It is...
in 1989.
Selected publications
- Cooper, F. S., & Kruger, P. G. Standard wave-lengths in the copper spectrum in the region 80A to 650A. Physical ReviewPhysical ReviewPhysical Review is an American scientific journal founded in 1893 by Edward Nichols. It publishes original research and scientific and literature reviews on all aspects of physics. It is published by the American Physical Society. The journal is in its third series, and is split in several...
, 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. Journal of the Acoustical Society of AmericaJournal of the Acoustical Society of AmericaJournal of the Acoustical Society of America is a scientific journal in the field of acoustics, published by the Acoustical Society of America. It contains technical articles on sound, vibration, speech and other topics.Access to articles is by subscription or purchase, though most universities...
, 1950, 22, 761-762. - Cooper, F. S. Guidance devices for the blind. Physics TodayPhysics TodayPhysics Today, created in 1948, is the membership journal of the American Institute of Physics. It is provided to 130,000 members of twelve physics societies, including the American Physical Society...
, 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 Science, 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. Journal of the Acoustical Society of AmericaJournal of the Acoustical Society of AmericaJournal of the Acoustical Society of America is a scientific journal in the field of acoustics, published by the Acoustical Society of America. It contains technical articles on sound, vibration, speech and other topics.Access to articles is by subscription or purchase, though most universities...
, 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 ReviewPsychological ReviewPsychological Review is a scientific journal that publishes articles on psychological theory. It was founded by Princeton psychologist James Mark Baldwin and Columbia psychologist James McKeen Cattell in 1894 as a publication vehicle for psychologists not connected with the Clark laboratory of G....
, 1967, 74, 431-461. - Cooper, F. S. Haskins Laboratories: Research on human communication, marine ecology, and the biochemistry of protozoa. ScienceScience (journal)Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....
, 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 DevelopmentJournal of Rehabilitation Research and DevelopmentThe Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development is 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. Itcovers research on rehabilitation medicine. It...
, 1984, Vol. 2l, No. 1., 51-87.