Page 43 - Winter 2010

Passings
Dick Stern
Applied Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University PO Box 30, State College, Pennsylvania 16804
Beginning with her master’s
degree in 1960 until her last publica-
tion in 2007, Rhona Hellman’s nearly
60 publications—mostly in the
Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America (JASA)—dealt with every
facet of loudness. She refined the
direct methods of S. S. Stevens to
investigate the relation between loud-
ness and sound level under most rel-
evant stimulus conditions—in the
quiet, in noise, as a function of stim-
ulus duration, of signal frequency, of
spectral composition—and listener
conditions—in one ear, in two, in
normal ears, in impaired ears. Her
thoroughness and breadth made
Rhona a preeminent international expert in this field.
Rhona’s interest in psychoacoustics and in loudness began and was nurtured with Joe Zwislocki at Syracuse University. Her work with Zwislocki led her to conclude that listeners scale loudness with reference to their own acquired units. Among paradoxical phenomena that she investigated was her
demonstration that under certain conditions the loudness of mixtures of pure tones and random noise increased despite decreasing sound intensity. Another fundamental find- ing was that the just noticeable incre- ment in intensity is independent of the slope of the loudness functions.
Most of Rhona’s professional life was spent in the Boston area, at Harvard with Stevens, at Boston University, and at Northeastern with Bert Scharf and Mary Florentine. She also collaborated with Yôiti Suzuki at Tohuku University in Sendai, Japan, where she received her Ph.D. in 1998.
Despite much suffering in her last two years, she continued working on refinements of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) loudness stan- dard which was the subject of her last paper, a new ANSI loud-
ness standard, published in Acoustics Today in 2007. Bert Scharf and Joe Zwislocki
Rhona Hellman
1935–2009
ASA has learned of the deaths of the following Acoustical Society members:
D. Vance Holliday Gideon Maidanik Ronald Schusterman
Acoustics Today accepts contributions for “Passings.” Submissions of about 250 words that may be edited in MSWord or plain text files should be e-mailed to AcousticsToday@aip.org. Photographs may be informal, but must be at least 300 dpi. Please send the text and photographs in separate files.
Passings 39