Ludimar Hermann was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 physiologist

Physiology

Physiology is the science of the function of living systems. This includes how organisms, organ systems, organs, cells, and bio-molecules carry out the chemical or physical functions that exist in a living system. The highest honor awarded in physiology is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or...

 and speech scientist

Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...

 who used the Edison

Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...

 phonograph

Phonograph

The phonograph record player, or gramophone is a device introduced in 1877 that has had continued common use for reproducing sound recordings, although when first developed, the phonograph was used to both record and reproduce sounds...

 to test theories of vowel production, particularly those of Robert Willis and Charles Wheatstone. He coined the word formant

Formant

Formants are defined by Gunnar Fant as 'the spectral peaks of the sound spectrum |P|' of the voice. In speech science and phonetics, formant is also used to mean an acoustic resonance of the human vocal tract...

, a term of importance in modern acoustic phonetics

Acoustic phonetics

Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates properties like the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, or other properties of its frequency spectrum, and the relationship...

. The Hermann Grid is named after him; he was the first to report the illusion in scientific literature.

Physiology research

In addition to his work in phonetics, Hermann was influential as a physiologist. He disproved the notion, propounded by Emil du Bois-Reymond

Emil du Bois-Reymond

Emil du Bois-Reymond was a German physician and physiologist, the discoverer of nerve action potential, and the father of experimental electrophysiology.-Life:...

, that muscles contained an ordered series of "electromotive molecules". Hermann showed that the entire surface of an uninjured muscle was electrically equipotential. His discoveries in this field were instrumental to the modern use of the electrocardiograph as a diagnostic tool. He also was the first to explain the digestive process

Digestion

Digestion is the mechanical and chemical breakdown of food into smaller components that are more easily absorbed into a blood stream, for instance. Digestion is a form of catabolism: a breakdown of large food molecules to smaller ones....

 as being a decomposition of protein through acid hydrolysis

Acid hydrolysis

Acid hydrolysis is a chemical process in which acid is used to convert cellulose or starch to sugar.It implies a chemical mechanism of hydrolysis catalyzed by a Brønsted-Lowry or Arrhenius acid. By contrast, it does not usually imply hydrolysis by direct electrophilic attack—as may originate from...

 to obtain the raw materials needed by cells.

An obituarist credited his research success to "his exceptional skill in the design, construction, and use of apparatus as needed for the problems on which he was engaged. Most of these problems depended for their solution on the accurate measurement of physical quantities."

Phonetics research

In his analysis of voice and speech, he made use of photographic registration

Image registration

Image registration is the process of transforming different sets of data into one coordinate system. Data may be multiple photographs, data from different sensors, from different times, or from different viewpoints. It is used in computer vision, medical imaging, military automatic target...

 and magnification of the surface features of a phonograph record's grooves to visually display the sounds of speech. Through his work, he determined that the passage of air through the mouth cavity, modified for each vowel, strongly affected the harmonics of tones from the larynx

Larynx

The larynx , commonly called the voice box, is an organ in the neck of amphibians, reptiles and mammals involved in breathing, sound production, and protecting the trachea against food aspiration. It manipulates pitch and volume...

.

External links

• Photo, biography, and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory
  Virtual Laboratory
  The online project Virtual Laboratory. Essays and Resources on the Experimentalization of Life, 1830-1930, located at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, is dedicated to research in the history of the experimentalization of life...
  
   of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
  Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
  The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin was established in March 1994. Its research is primarily devoted to a theoretically oriented history of science, principally of the natural sciences, but with methodological perspectives drawn from the cognitive sciences and from...