Gunnar Fant

Biography

The field of speech research owes much to Dr. Gunnar Fant and Dr. Kenneth N. Stevens, who first collaborated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1949. Dr. Fant has been instrumental in creating the multi-disciplinary area of speech communications and technology, while Dr. Stevens has pioneered the science and engineering of speech acoustics, production, perception and processing. Their textbooks 'Dr. Fant's Preliminaries to Speech Analysis' (co-authored by Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle) and 'Acoustic Theory of Speech Production' and Dr. Stevens' 'Acoustic Phonetics' remain definitive speech processing texts.

Dr. Fant is professor emeritus in what is now the department of speech, music and hearing at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, and he is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. His honors include the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences' gold medal and the Ericsson prize in telecommunication (shared with James Flanagan).