Franklin S. Cooper

Franklin Seaney Cooper (April 29, 1908 – February 20, 1999) was an American physicist and inventor who was a pioneer in speech research.[1]

He attended the University of Illinois where he received his undergraduate degree in physics in 1931, and received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. In 1935, with Caryl Haskins, he founded Haskins Laboratories, a nonprofit research laboratory that is located in New Haven, Connecticut, and studies speech and language. His primary interest was in speech synthesis and perception, which led him to invent the Pattern playback, an early electromechanical device for synthesizing speech. It became a forerunner of contemporary computer-based speech synthesis programs and was used by many scientists at Haskins to discover the critical cues for speech synthesis and recognition. Cooper designed other special-purpose synthesizers in the early 1950s, including Octopus, Voback, Intonator, and Alexander. Of these four, only the Voback and the Intonator, which were "parasitic on Homer Dudley's Vocoder", were used extensively for perceptual experiments. He was aided in the construction of these devices by the late John M. Borst.

During World War II, at the request of Vannevar Bush, Cooper took a position in the Office of Scientific Research and Development. He also returned to Washington in 1973, when he was selected to form a panel of six experts [2] charged with investigating the famous 18-minute gap in the White House office tapes of President Richard Nixon related to the Watergate scandal [3].

...
Wikipedia