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ities, and have influenced such fields as sound localization and perceptual sequencing within a sensory stream. Ira’s strongest research connections were to the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, and it was there that he enjoyed the excitement of his long research career.
Ira was a person who had high standards, for himself as well as others. As an academic leader and scientist he could be forceful and demanding, but his goal was always the betterment of the field. He had an unflagging devotion to psychology as a hard science. Those who shared his values and goals had a robust ally and colleague.
Ira also had a life full of outside interests. He enjoyed his left-hander advantage in tennis and in winters he could be found frequenting the ice-skating rinks around St. Louis, where
he was an accomplished figure skater, and he and Shirley per- formed ice dancing. His interest in music was a life-long avoca- tion, and he regularly was part of a barbershop quartet that per- formed at the meetings of the Acoustical Society. He directed and sang in the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis’ choir as well as with the St. Louis Chamber Chorus and the Bach Society of St. Louis. He traveled extensively, including sabbaticals spent in China, Japan, and France. He became a connoisseur of French wine, and served as a wine consultant to the Washington University Faculty Club.
Ira was preceded in death by his wife of 61 years, Shirley, who passed away in 2004.
Charles S. Watson
Ilse Lehiste
1922–2010
Ilse Lehiste, a distin- guished scholar and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, died on 25 December 2010 after a brief bout with pneumonia. Her death marked the end of more than six decades of meticulous and ground-breaking research in many areas of Speech Communication.
Dr. Lehiste was born on
31 January 1922 in Tallinn, but
her family left Estonia in 1944.
While living in refugee camps,
she attended the University of
Hamburg, earning a Doctor of
Philology degree in 1948. She
immigrated to the United
States in the following year,
and held a position as an Associate Professor of Modern Languages at the Detroit Institute of Technology until she began working on her second doctorate, a Ph.D. in Linguistics, at the University of Michigan. After earning that degree in 1959, she continued to work with her mentor, Gordon E. Peterson, for several more years, as they published a series of seminal papers on duration, “intrinsic” fundamental frequency, and amplitude variation in English. At the same time, she began parallel work on the acoustic correlates of the quantity and accent contrasts of Finnish, Estonian, and Serbo-Croatian. In 1963, Ilse Lehiste joined the faculty at the Ohio State University, which she continued to make her home base for an equally long and productive research career as Professor Emerita after her retirement in 1987. She was the author, co-author, or editor of 20 books and about 200 articles. Her keynote lecture on the occasion of receiving the 2002 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement from the International Speech Communication Association touched on just a few of her many contributions.
Dr. Lehiste was known first as one of the small handful of American speech scientists who were already doing important
foundational work on speech prosody in the late 1950’s, a time when much of the focus in Speech Communication was on uncovering the acoustic corre- lates of consonant and vowel features. Her monumental review monograph on Suprasegmentals, published in 1970, summarized her first two decades of work on speech prosody, but it also did much more, synthesizing results from the psychoacoustics literature on the perception of pitch, loudness, and duration with results from nearly all of the then-extant research on acoustic correlates of word con- trasts involving tone, accent,
and quantity. Over the next two decades, she turned her atten- tion to prosody above the word and to the ways in which sen- tence rhythms and melodies reflect syntactic structure and even higher-level discourse organization. After Estonia regained its independence in 1991, she was able to be more active in fostering researchers in the Baltic countries. For exam- ple, she then began the long and fruitful collaboration with musicologist Jaan Ross on the acoustic manifestations of the ways in which the meter of folk music and poetry in a language crystallize the rhythms of ordinary speech.
Throughout her life, Ilse Lehiste influenced our field also by her contributions to education. Her careful selection of Readings in Acoustic Phonetics was the standard primer for a quarter of a century, until the 1991 publication of the 3-volume collection of Papers in Speech Communication that was edited for the Acoustical Society of America by Bishu Atal, Raymond Kent, and Joanne Miller. Her hundreds of colleagues, friends, and students mourn her loss.
Mary E. Beckman
Passings 53