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President-Elect in 1992-93, as Vice President in 1993-94, as President-Elect in 1995-96, and as President in 1996-97. He served as Associate Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America from 1981 to 2003, and handled a large number of articles in a variety of areas, including transduction, acoustical measurements, and any paper loosely identified as applied acoustics.
In 2002, at a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of India and the Madras Chapter of ASA in Vellore, India, Stanley Ehlich received the first Mira Paul Memorial Award, an award,including a Gold Medal, which was then granted by the Indian organization, The Acoustical Foundation, Editorial , Educational, and Charitable Trust (AFECT). The award was then given annually to an outstanding acoustician whose
achievements exemplify the ideals of AFECT, which is based in Madras and which has programs to help deafened individu- als. Other recipients of the AFECT award included Leo Beranek, Richard Lyon, and Allan Pierce.
Mr. Ehrlich was also an active member of the IEEE, chair- ing and serving on several committees. He was the Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering from 1975 to 1981 and the Editor of that Journal from 1982 to 1987
Mr. Ehrlich, with his wife, Louise, who passed away in 1996, was a resident of Middletown, RI, since 1960, where he served as President of the Chevrah Kadishah (Burial Society) and an active member of the Newport Chavurah. He is sur- vived by his daughter, Barbara, his sons, Stephen and Michael and six grandchildren.
Melville Clark, Jr.
1922–2012
The world lost a pioneer in electronic synthe- sis of the sounds of musical instruments and an ardent supporter of acoustical research Nov. 23, 2012, with the passing of Dr. Melville Clark, Jr., 90, Wayland, Mass. Born and raised in Syracuse, New York, son of harpist and entrepreneur Melville Clark, Sr. and pianist Dorothy S. Clark, he often said he gained his ear for music in the womb as his mother practiced piano.
Mel received his bachelors in physics from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
1943. After deployment to the Manhattan Project
in Los Alamos, he took masters and doctoral degrees in physics from Harvard in 1947 and 1949, with post-graduate work at Princeton. He then served as a nuclear physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and the University of California’s radiation laboratory in Livermore, California.
Mel was teaching graduate courses in plasma physics at MIT when I arrived there in the fall of 1959. He also was doing his own research on musical acoustics, which is what excited me. With funding from the National Association of Music Merchants, Mel sponsored several undergraduate students doing experimental studies of the properties of various instru- ments’ sounds. A doctoral student who preceded me carried out computer analyses of wind instrument tones. I took the analysis results and performed various experiments on the computer synthesis of wind instrument tones. Mel’s mentorship inspired me to focus on the acoustics of music and speech in my subsequent career at Brigham Young University.
Mel’s goal and life’s work was to make a keyboard instru- ment with the full range of expression of orchestral instru- ments that could be played easily and well by students and masters at all levels.
Mel eventually left MIT to devote himself more fully to his invention and acoustical experiments. He worked for NASA, Combustion Engineering, Raytheon, and others as a
physicist and consulting engineer while pursuing his acoustical explorations as president of Melville Clark Associates. He worked closely with Harold Shapero of Brandeis to produce sample sounds on his portamento keyboard. In the 1960s, the Yamaha corporation offered to buy Mel’s synthesizer, the Expressor model A. He turned down this offer because he wanted to pro- duce the instrument in America, and probably because he did not want to relinquish control of its further development.
In 1992, Mel established the non-profit Institute for Scientific Research in Music, which continues today under the direction of Dennis Coscia. The institute recently supported joint research on high-precision measure- ments of the frequency dependent directivity of musical instruments. Another joint project supported high-quality digital recordings of numerous musical instruments, not just of the European orchestra but of many world instruments. This research provides a library of clean anechoic recordings. Mel’s continuing investments in acoustical research have
been a real benefit to our efforts at BYU.
Mel continued to refine the Expressor for the rest of his
life, drawing on his deep understanding of musical tone and expression and his expertise in the physics of sound. He authored or co-authored four books, published dozens of articles and reports and holds more than 20 patents. At the time of his death, he was refining his digital reproductions of the 58 ways to attack a violin string. While his instrument has never gone into production, a number of Mel’s innovations have since been adopted by others, notably pitch shifting and pressure sensitivity in keyboards. Mel was a member of the ASA, the APS, the AAAS, the IEEE, and Sigma Xi.
William J. Strong
Brigham Young University
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