Personnel:

Principal Investigator: Michael N. Geselowitz, Ph.D., Director - IEEE History Center

Research Assistant: Mary Ann Hoffman, Archivist/Pagemaster - IEEE History Center

The IEEE History Center (IHC) is a cooperative venture of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. - which serves the community of electrical and information technologists and scientists - and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Founded in 1884 by the few practitioners of the new electrical engineering discipline, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has grown into the world's largest technical professional society. Today's IEEE comprises more than 320,000 members who conduct and participate in its activities in 152 countries. The men and women of the IEEE are the technical and scientific professionals making the revolutionary engineering advances which are reshaping our world today. The IEEE, through its members, provides leadership in areas ranging from aerospace, computers and communications to biomedical technology, electric power and consumer electronics. For the latest research and innovations in the many diverse fields of electrical and electronics engineering industry, and individuals look to the IEEE.

The technical objectives of the IEEE focus on advancing the theory and practice of electrical, electronics and computer engineering and computer science. To realize these objectives, the IEEE sponsors technical conferences, symposia and local meetings worldwide; publishes nearly one third of the world's technical papers in electrical, electronics and computer engineering; provides educational programs to keep its members' knowledge and expertise state-of-the-art; and maintains a massive Website with various services for members and customers. The purpose of all these activities is twofold: (1) to enhance the quality of life for all people through improved public awareness of the influences and applications of it's technologies; and (2) to advance the technical ability of the engineering profession and its members. The role of the IEEE's History Center is to further the societal aims of the IEEE through preserving, researching and promoting the history of IEEE-related technologies.

The volunteer governance of the IEEE is supported by a professional staff of over 600, who are located in offices across the country and around the world, but who are concentrated mainly at the IEEE operational headquarters in Piscataway, New Jersey. The IHC resides a few miles away on the New Brunswick Campus of Rutgers University.

Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, with over 47,000 students on campuses in Camden and Newark as well as in New Brunswick, is one of the major state university systems in the nation. The IHC is affiliated with the New Brunswick Faculty of Arts and Sciences History Department, which is consistently ranked in the top 20 of departments in its field. Another important affiliate of the History Department in the history of technology area is the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project.

The staff of IHC consists of the Director, Dr. Michael N. Geselowitz, two Ph.D. Research Historians, a Post-doctoral Fellow, Mary Ann Hoffman, the Archivist/Pagemaster, and a Research Assistant. In addition, graduate students from the Rutgers History Department work at the Center as Graduate Assistants. IHC will build on its recent research and publication on signal processing history to document to contrasting developments, one where a long history and an active interaction of many disciplines has not yet led to widespread penetration into everyday life and one where a relatively straightforward technical focus has had wide-ranging economic impact. In both cases the social, political and economic environment must also be tackled if the technological trajectory is to be understood. It is hoped therefore that scholarly publications will also emerge from this project.

Speech synthesis and recognition, the ability to automatically create human speech from a written text and conversely, to have an automaton recognize human speech and respond to it or convert it into written text, today have begun to have applications in many walks of life - one need only think of the image of physicist Stephen Hawking communicating through his voice synthesizer. Yet they had long been unrealized dreams of inventors, and the paths to their development were full of twists and turns.

Mechanical devices to achieve speech synthesis were conceived of in the realm of fiction, and first devised in the early 19th century. The invention of the telephone in the late 19th century, and the subsequent efforts to reduce the bandwidth requirements of transmitting voice, led back to the idea. In the 1930s, the telephone engineers at Bell Labs developed the famous Voder, a speech synthesizer that was unveiled to the public to great fanfare at the 1939 World's Fair, but that still required a skilled human operator.

Fully automatic speech synthesis came in the early 1960s, with the invention of new automatic coding schemes, such as Adaptive Predictive Coding (APC). With those new techniques in hand, the Bell Labs engineers again turned their attention to speech synthesis. By the late 1960s they had developed a system for internal use in the telephone industry, a system that read wiring instructions to Western Electric telephone wirers, who could then keep eyes and hands on their work. Further progress led to the introduction, in 1976, of the Kurzweil Reading Machine which for the first time allowed the blind to 'read' plain text as opposed to Braille. By 1978, the technology was so well established and inexpensive to produce that it could be introduced in a toy, Texas Instruments' Speak-and-Spell. Thus, the development of this important technology from inception until fruition took about 15 years, involved practitioners from various disciplines, most of whom are still alive, and had a far-reaching impact on other technologies and, through them, society as a whole.

Although existing for at least as long as speech synthesis in the realm of science fiction (think of the robot Gort being given his instructions in the classic film The Day the Earth Stood Still), automatic speech recognition has a shorter history. It needed much more the developments of digital signal processing (DSP) theory and technique of the 1960s, such as APC, to even come under consideration for development.

Work in the early 1970s was again driven by the telephone industry which hoped for both voice-activated dialing and also for security procedures based on voice recognition. Through gradual development in the 1980s and into the 1990s, error rates in both these areas were brought down to the point where the technologies could be commercialized. In 1992, AT&T introduced its automated operator service VRCP (Voice Recognition Call Processing), and in 1997 Apple Computer introduced software for taking voice dictation in Mandarin Chinese. Today, 60 years after the Voder and just 35 years after APC, both these interrelated technologies can be said to be fully operational, in a case where a very convoluted technological history has had a modest and more or less anticipated social impact.

The development of techniques of digitally recording audio, on the other hand was in a way linear, and its impact on society was direct and immediate (and even more pronounced than in speech recognition and synthesis), but the technological path and the social impact path did not have a one-to-one correspondence. The use of digital encoding in telecommunications and the other advances in DSP, such as in speech synthesis, led to the use of DSP in recording. In 1972 Nippon Columbia began to digitally master recordings, and in the same year the BBC began using pulse code modulation for high-quality sound distribution in radio and television and in its studios began using an 8-track digital audio recorder with error correction. By 1975, it was demonstrated that DSP could improve old recordings (in the first case, by engineer Tom Stockham, historical recordings of Enrico Caruso), and digital audio tapes began to be widely adopted by audio engineers. Music synthesizers incorporating digital recording also began to proliferate. But then the technology took an interesting turn.

Ironically, the key development in digital audio recording, that of the compact disk, began in 1969 when a physicist at the Philips plant in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, started a small project to develop a product to store and retrieve video images on a disk. In that key year of 1972, however, technical difficulties led the emphasis to be shifted to sound recording, and the project was given higher priority within Philips. By 1979 a prototype was available.

In that year, Philips entered into an agreement with Sony of Japan to produce a commercially viable version. By 1983, they were ready to roll out the compact disk player, and Philips manufactured 100,000 units. Within five years, Philips was manufacturing almost 3,000,000 units per year, Sony even more, and other companies had entered the market. By the end of the decade, vinyl records and the equipment to record and play them were a quaint thing of the past, of interest only to a certain class of audiophile and to the historian. The use of audio tapes continued only because they could be recorded on non-commercially, a feature lacking in CDs. The technology underlying the music industry was completely transformed, leading to economic and, eventually, artistic changes as well.

On the other hand, digital audio tape, a recordable medium that was adopted by sound engineers, did not become a commercial success in the consumer marketplace. A betamax-style digital audio tape was available as early as the late 1970s, but flopped commercially. A fully analog-compatible digital compact cassette was launched in the early 1990s to critical acclaim but again to commercial failure. Of course, in the past couple of years 'DAT' has been introduced, but how well this latest incarnation of digital audio tape will do against the CD is yet to be seen. At the same time, the professed 'holy grail' of the industry remains a commercially viable CD that can be recorded on in the consumer's home. Yet the again critically acclaimed Sony mini-disc of the early 1990s has not yet found commercial viability.

These changes therefore raise questions beyond the mere technical: What are the social implications of these still-new technologies? Why did Philips set out to replace an apparently mature technology (the phonograph)? Why do CDs still cost so much, although the players have come down in price? What are the roles of non-technological factors, such as the U.S. government and its 1995 Digital recording Act in this story. This project will be able to address these issues as well as the underlying technological development, and to add the insights of the technical participants themselves to those of other observers.

1999 (January-December)

January-March: Specify and select software; hold preliminary discussions with evaluation committees; begin preliminary site design

April: Consortium staff meeting. Finalize general design.

October: Each consortium member mounts one topic for public viewing and testing.

November: Second topic mounted; publicity/mailings sent out.

2000 (January-December)

February: Each consortium member meets with its evaluation committee to review progress and problems

March: Consortium staff meeting. Evaluate early experiences, problems; bring feedback from own evaluation process to whole group.

May: Each consortium member meets with its evaluation committee to review further progress, bring feedback from other consortium members, and begin to discuss plans for report of outcomes.

July: Each consortium member holds final meeting with its evaluation committee. Finalize recommendations for final report

September: Final consortium staff meeting. Discuss final reports

December: Issue final reports. Sites continue development under organizational sponsorship, depending on evaluations.