Van den Berg started studying Mathematics and Physics in Amsterdam. After a forced long hiding period during WW2 he continued his studies at the University of Groningen and was appointed at the Physiology Department on August 28, 1948. In 1953 he cum laude defended his thesis: “Physica van de Stemvorming, met toepassingen” (“Physics of Voice Production, with practical applications”).

His research was initially conducted to determine the formants of Dutch vowels, but he was confronted with several impossibilities in the physical explanations of the laryngeal production of voiced sounds. He extensively studied the prevailing knowledge in the first half of the 20^th century on phonetics, acoustics, phoniatrics, and speech physiology. His work resulted in a comprehensive monograph rendering an ” elaborate and as we believe a balanced and physically founded theory of voice production”, as he wrote in the English summary of his thesis. He presented this as the myoelastic-aerodynamic theory of voice production in 1958. The theory is widely accepted by voice scientists. This monograph was immediately translated into English by Bell Labs.

In another paper he refuted in French the neurochronaxique theory of Raoul Husson. He experimentally confirmed this by his experiments on larynges removed at post-mortem.

His research on the (singing) voice drew the attention of singers from many parts of the world, some of whom even visited him in Groningen. This led, with the assistance of William Vennard, in 1960 to the Instructional film: “The Vibrating Larynx” which was a standard for a long time, showing a live functioning larynx for the first time in history. This film won him the Belgian `Prix de la recherche scientifique` in 1962. In that same year he presented an extensive overview of experimental phonetics as the main lecture of the IALP (International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics) congress in Padua.

A new method for teaching esophageal voice for patients who had their larynx removed for cancer got its scientific basis by van den Berg, applying the newly invented Philips X-ray image amplifier.

Janwillem van den Berg was appointed lector (associate professor) of Medical Physics in 1957.  After having founded the Laboratory for Medical Physics he became full professor of Medical Physics on November 13, 1963.

In addition to his research on the voice, he contributed work on lung physiology by medical specialists; on stereotactic operations for Parkinson’s; and on force distributions between the teeth for the dentistry department. He was well befriended with the other speech and voice scholars at this time.

From 1959 van den Berg also started working on an implantable cardiac pacemaker with an externally adjustable heart rate. As many elements of this innovative work became patented, not much was published before its official introduction in 1962. The licenced commercial production was obtained by a small Dutch company named Vitatron, which became highly successful on a worldwide scale. A considerable list of these patents is attributed to van den Berg (see: Google: Company Vitatron, and www.rijksmuseumboerhave.nl, the site of the Dutch National Science History Museum).The revenues of his patents were transferred to The Groningen University Fund.

Van den Berg had a fundamental knowledge of analogue electronics. He designed in the fifties a commercially available stroboscope with the company Arend-Van Gogh for optical evaluation of the vocal folds. He also designed (along with the fully transistorized pacemaker and the stroboscope), several types of equipment for teaching students. His teaching was meticulously prepared and executed.

Also, he guided research on the peripheral blood circulation and hemodynamics in the human body. Together with a coworker he designed an electronic analogue of the blood circulation and of the acoustic properties of the subglottic airway system.

I (Harm Schutte) became a student assistant in 1963 in the Lab were I saw “The Vibrating Larynx” for the first time. I was given the task of showing the film to visitors. Another task was to be a guinea pig for the study of  vowels by an externally driven vibrator placed on the laryngeal region, performed in an acoustical dead box. I was captivated by scientific research. My own thesis work in the ENT department was in fact an extension of the study by van den Berg from 1956 (“Direct and Indirect Determination of the Mean Subglottic Pressure,” Folia Phoniatrica).  My thesis with van den Berg as promotor, was finished in 1980, after six to seven years sitting every fortnight for a couple of hours next to him to get lessons on his first love: the voice.

I (Ron Scherer) was introduced to van den Berg’s work in 1972 by my first mentor at the University of Iowa, Dr. James Curtis. Dr. Curtis asked me if I had read the paper “On the Air Resistance and the Bernoulli Effect of the Human Larynx” (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1957). That was the first I had heard of van den Berg, and was completely enthralled by the physical modeling in that paper. I then built seven wax models of the larynx, life size, and cast and studied two of them (Model 1 and Model 2), and then built another (Model 3) five times larger than life size, and measured intraglottal and transglottal pressures, checking van den Berg’s (and others’) equations. Those models constituted my dissertation. That lead to other models, especially to Model M5. I owe my entire modeling career to van den Berg and his attention to the need to clarify laryngeal aerodynamics.

Van den Berg died too early, in 1985 – a great loss for family and science. He was one of the greatest voice scientists in the history of voice research and the understanding of phonation.

Harm K. Schutte, MD ENT, PhD
Ronald C. Scherer, PhD

June 18, 2024