Page 56 - Winter 2011

Ira Hirsh was born in
New York City on February
22, 1922. He earned BA
degrees in English and math
in 1942 from the New York
State College for Teachers. A
year later he married fellow
student Shirley Kyle, who
became Ira’s life-long com-
panion, colleague, and col-
laborator. After earning an
MA from Northwestern
University’s School of Speech
Ira served as a Lieutenant in
the Army Air Force from
1944-46, first as an instructor
in communications and later
in aural rehabilitation. After
the war, Ira joined the
Psychoacoustic Lab at
Harvard University, whose
director was S. S. (Smitty)
Stevens. Stevens assembled a
entists in a single lab, during
included J.C. R. Licklider, Hallowell Davis, James Egan, George Miller, Georg von Békésy, and other well-known members of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). The benefits Ira gained through those associations were clear to all who knew him, as were the influences of Ray Carhart and the other pioneers in audiology at Northwestern, where Ira first became interested in hearing and deafness. Ira complet- ed his Ph.D. in 1948, but stayed on at Harvard for several years, where he developed a friendship with B.F. Skinner. He and Skinner shared a deep interest in music. Plus they both had interests in applied psychology (Skinner had just pub- lished Walden II in 1948). When Ira left Harvard in 1951 Skinner gave him a copy of Helmholtz’s The Sensations of Tone” saying that it was good science but useless when the need was to tune a piano. “Take the damn thing with you,” Skinner inscribed in the book. Ira did, and throughout his research career he devoted a portion of his efforts to applied questions, including auditory rehabilitation, noise abate-
ment, and deaf education.
In 1951 Ira moved west to St. Louis to take a research posi- tion at the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID), along with an assistant professorship in the Department of Psychology at Washington University. Ira quickly rose through the ranks, becoming Director of Research at CID (1965-1983), Professor of Psychology in 1961, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science (1969-1973), and Chair of the Psychology Department (1983- 1987). Along the way Ira won numerous awards and honors, including election to the National Academy of Science, the Gold Medal of the ASA, and the Whetnall Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine. At the time of his death, on January 12, 2010, Ira was the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of
Psychology and Audiology at Washington University.
A year after arriving at Washington University Ira pub- lished The Measurement of Hearing which quickly became the standard textbook in psychological acoustics courses as well as a basic reference for audiologists. In addition to this book, Ira published over 100 scholarly articles, many of which laid the groundwork for research that has revolutionized such fields as audiology, psychoacoustics, audiometry, and deaf education. For example, Ira was among the first scientists to push audito- ry research beyond the study of single tones, clicks, or noise bursts. His dissertation investigated the influence of inter-aural phase on the detection of tones masked by noise, a phenome- non known today as the masking-level difference, and around which a huge literature, both basic and applied, has developed. As another example, Ira and Carl Sherrick published a paper in 1959 on the perception of temporal order and the role this abil- ity plays in recognizing sounds, both speech and nonspeech. His basic findings have been generalized to other sense modal-
Passings
Dick Stern
Applied Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University PO Box 30, State College, Pennsylvania 16804
Ira Hirsh
1922–2010
truly remarkable group of sci- and just after World War II. It
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.
52 Acoustics Today, January 2011