Page 53 - Volume 9, Issue 3

Passings
Allan D. Pierce
Acoustical Society of America Publications Office West Barnstable, MA 02668
Sid P. Bacon, a major contributor to our
understanding of auditory temporal pro-
cessing, died on July 11, 2013 after a coura-
geous 19-month battle with pancreatic can-
cer. Sid was born in Kansas City on July 24,
1955 and raised in Salina, Kansas by his
adoptive parents, Marge and Bob Bacon. He
completed a bachelor’s degree in speech and
hearing sciences in 1977 and a master’s
degree in audiology in 1979 from the
University of Kansas. After completing his
master’s degree, Sid spent six months as a
visiting student with Walt Jesteadt at the
Boys Town National Research Hospital
(BTNRH) in Omaha, Nebraska before
enrolling as a doctoral student in experi-
mental psychology with Neal Viemeister at the University of Minnesota. Sid returned to Boys Town as a postdoctoral fel- low in 1985, but spent the beginning of that time with Brian Moore at Cambridge. He moved to Vanderbilt as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Hearing & Speech Sciences in 1986 and to Arizona State University as an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science in 1988. Sid later served as department chair, as dean of the Division of Natural Sciences and as Associate Vice President at Arizona State. He was a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
At the University of Kansas, Sid was part of an active group of students that included Lynne Marshall, Marjorie Leek and Israel Raz. As a visiting student at BTNRH, he was part of the initial research group that included Charles Watson, Eric Javel, Donna Neff, Edward Walsh and JoAnn McGee. Sid helped collect a large set of forward masking data before moving on to the University of Minnesota.
During his graduate studies at Minnesota, Sid focused his research interests on temporal processing. This work involved investigations of forward masking, modulation detection in normal and hearing-impaired listeners, and intensity coding. His research on forward masking indicated that frequency selectivity, a fundamental characteristic of
hearing, is a dynamic process in which the auditory system can increase its selectivity depending on the temporal and spectral characteristics of the acoustic environment. This work led to his Ph.D. dissertation and to several important papers that were pub- lished in JASA. While at Minnesota, Sid was a vital and stimulating student and col- league who demonstrated the creativity, intelligence and independence that assured his success in auditory science. Early in his time there, he met Cathy Kittelson, his future wife, at a university retreat.
In 1985, Sid moved to Cambridge, England with Cathy and daughter Laura to begin an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellow-
ship.. He continued studying the development of auditory fre- quency selectivity over time. He showed that the sharpness of tuning, as measured using psychophysical tuning curves (PTCs), depended on the temporal position of the signal with- in the masker, the highest sharpness being observed when the signal was temporally centered in the masker. In another study, Sid examined the mechanisms underlying one form of the “overshoot” effect, namely that the threshold for detecting a signal in simultaneous masking declines as the signal onset is delayed relative to the onset of a longer duration masker. Sid, together with Brian Moore, proposed the “transient masking” hypothesis, that transient responses to the masker can impair detection of transient responses to the signal, even when the transients occur in different peripheral channels. This was an early example of an across-channel process.
Sid returned to BTNRH in Omaha for the remainder of his postdoctoral fellowship, where he continued to work on the development of auditory frequency selectivity over time, using a forward masking paradigm, and also gained experi- ence in single-unit auditory physiology. In 1986, Sid moved to Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, as Assistant Professor and Director of Research in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences. During his two years there, he gained experience as a mentor of graduate students and col- laborated with Wes Grantham on some of the earliest studies
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, July 2013
Sid P. Bacon
1955–2013