Biography

Gunnar FANT (October 8, 1919 – June 6, 2009) was an electrical engineer who spent most of his career at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. Pioneer in research on human speech communication and language analysis, he greatly contributed to the fundamental understanding of how speech sounds are produced and articulated in the vocal tract. His work during the latter half of the 20th century set research patterns and techniques for a generation of students and researchers of speech science (Flanagan, Forsberg and Lang, 2011).

He graduated in May 1945 with a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering at the Department of Telegraphy and Telephony in KTH, while working on theoretical matters of relations between speech intelligibility and reduction of overall system bandwidth, incorporating the effects of different types of hearing loss. For the three following years (1945-1949), he worked at the acoustics laboratory of Ericsson Telephone Company, where he constructed his own speech analysis equipment and carried out acoustical analyses of Swedish sustained vowels and sonorants. One outcome of this Ericsson work was an audiogram of frequency-intensity formant regions of Swedish speech sounds at a specified talking distance, which has become a standard reference in audiology referred to as the “formant banana”.  
A turning point was his invited stay at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard in 1949-1950, where he met Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle. He introduced a quantitative engineering component to the study of language, leading to the publication of  “Preliminaries to Speech Analysis—The Distinctive Features and Their Correlates” (MIT report 1952). He also initiated a career-long interaction with the speech group at MIT lead by Ken Stevens. He applied his knowledge of signal processing and acoustics to the study of human production and perception of speech sounds and to a potential universal organization of basic phonological units.
When he came back to Sweden, he founded the Speech Transmission Laboratory at KTH (1951-1966) which later became the Speech, Music and Hearing Department. “This laboratory quickly became a world center for speech research and related technical developments—all aspects of speech processing, including analysis, synthesis, recognition, production, and perception. The STL was also involved with prosthetic engineering that included speech training devices for the deaf and reading machines for the blind.” (Flanagan, Forsberg and Lang, 2011)

Gunnar Fant left us a major scientific legacy on the following topics : speech research overviews (1959 – 2000, 30 refs); speech production, models, synthesis, data (1950 – 2001, 77 refs); voice source (1962 – 2000, 38 refs); speech perception, audiology and speech aids (1949 – 1995, 20 refs); experimental phonetics, descriptive analysis (1948 – 2001, 35 refs); feature theory and speech code (1952 – 1990, 10 refs); prosody (1986 – 2007, 70 refs); speech coding and system design, Instrumentation (1945 – 1964, 24 refs); various in speech (1964 – 1968, 2 refs); language statistics (1958 – 1972, 3 refs).

If you wish to read more about this great man, we suggest the following links:

KTH In Memoriam webpage: https://www.kth.se/is/tmh/about-tmh/gunnar-fant-1.780135

Memorial tribute to Gunnar Fant from J.L. Flanagan, H.G. Forsberg and W.W. Lang : https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/12884/chapter/15
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Memorial Tributes: Volume 14. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/12884

Written by Nathalie Heinrich