Carl Gunnar Michael Fant (October 8, 1919 – June 6, 2009) was a leading researcher in speech science in general and

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 products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...

in particular who spent most of his career as a professor at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in

Stockholm Stockholm (; ) is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, most populous city of Sweden, as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in the Nordic countries. Approximately ...

. He was a first cousin of the actors and directors George Fant and Kenne Fant. Gunnar Fant received a

Master of Science A Master of Science (; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree. In contrast to the Master of Arts degree, the Master of Science degree is typically granted for studies in sciences, engineering and medici ...

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from KTH in 1945. He specialized in the acoustics of the

human voice The human voice consists of sound Voice production, made by a human being using the vocal tract, including Speech, talking, singing, Laughter, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically ...

, measuring formant values, and continued to work in this area at

Ericsson (), commonly known as Ericsson (), is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. Ericsson has been a major contributor to the development of the telecommunications industry and is one ...

and at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

. He also took the initiative of creating a speech communication department at KTH, unusual at the time. Fant's work led to the birth of a new era of speech synthesis with the introduction of powerful and configurable formant synthesizers. In 1960 he published the source-filter model of speech production, which became widely used. In the 1960s, Gunnar Fant's Orator Verbis Electris (OVE) competed with Walter Lawrence's Parametric Artificial Talker (PAT) in creating lifelike speech synthesis. In later years, Gunnar Fant remained active in the area of speech synthesis, focusing mainly on research on prosody. Fant received honorary doctorates from the Grenoble University (1978) and from Stockholm University (1988), and several other awards. In 1989, he was the inaugural recipient Scientific Achievement Medal of the International Speech Communication Association. He also received the Swedish Academy Margit Påhlson award, and the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award (2003). He was a member of the

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences () is one of the Swedish Royal Academies, royal academies of Sweden. Founded on 2 June 1739, it is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization that takes special responsibility for promoting nat ...

and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.

Bibliography

* Gunnar Fant (1960) ''Acoustic Theory of Speech Production''. Mouton De Gruyter. * Gunnar Fant (2006) ''Speech Acoustics and Phonetics: Selected Writings''. Springer. *

Roman Jakobson Roman Osipovich Jakobson (, ; 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzk ...

, C. Gunnar M. Fant, and Morris Halle (1961) P''reliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and Their Correlates''. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

References

Sources

* Dennis H. Klatt (1987). "Review of text-to-speech conversion for English". ''The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'', Vol. 82, No. 3, September 1987, pp. 737–793.

External links

Audio clips
from Dennis Klatt's "Review of text-to-speech conversion for English" 1919 births 2009 deaths Academic staff of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology Swedish scientists 20th-century Swedish engineers Speech perception researchers Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences Phoneticians {{Sweden-bio-stub