Page 67 - Summer 2018

Sound Perspectives
William A. Yost
Address:
Hearing Science Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona 85287 USA
Email:
william.yost@asu.edu
Micheal L. Dent
Address:
Department of Psychology University at Buffalo State University of New York B76 Park Hall Buffalo, New York 14260 USA
Email:
mdent@buffalo.edu
Ask an Acoustician: William A. Yost
Meet William A. Yost
For the third Ask an Acoustician column, one of the leaders in our field, William A. Yost, was inter- viewed. Bill doesn’t need too much of an introduc- tion; he served as president of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), and it is likely that many of our readers have his Fundamentals of Hearing textbook on their bookshelf right now. Bill received the Gold Medal at the ASA meeting in Minneapolis for his contributions to the field of acoustics. Let Bill tell you the rest.
A Conversation with William Yost, In His Words
Tell us about your work.
My career has had three interrelated dimensions: education, service, and research/ discovery. Education: While I immensely enjoy teaching, my most obvious con- tribution to education is probably the textbook Fundamentals of Hearing: An In- troduction (Yost, 2007; first published in 1977, now in its 5th edition, with over 290,000 copies sold worldwide). My 15 PhD students and 4 postdoctoral fellows are important to my dedication to education. Service: My service covers leader- ship positions such as ASA president, president of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO), member of the National Advisory Council to the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) of the Na- tional Institutes of Health (NIH), and national associate of the National Research Council (NRC). Research/Discovery: I study auditory perception where I use be- havioral techniques to understand peripheral and neural processing that underlie auditory perception. My research is integrated around sound source perception (e.g., Yost et al., 2007). My work on pitch perception (e.g., Yost, 2009), modulation processing (e.g., Yost et al., 1989), and spatial hearing (e.g., Yost and Gourevitch, 1987) are all components that allow for sound source perception. My recent re- search is focused on sound source localization when sound sources and listeners move, which reveals that sound source localization is not just an auditory process but is a multisystem neural interaction (e.g., Yost et al., 2015).
Describe your career path (how you got your start,
what made you choose your field).
I had a supportive mother (a journalist) and father (a PhD physicist who was briefly an ASA member) who encouraged me to be a lifelong learner. My youth was domi- nated by sports. I attended The Colorado College (CC), Colorado Springs, where I majored in psychology with a minor in math. I loved my psychology courses and the faculty at CC, two of whom, Gilbert Johns and Don Shearn, have provided lifelong mentoring and friendship. I went on to Indiana University, Bloomington, for a PhD in experimental psychology in the math psychology program (applying
©2018 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved. volume 14, issue 2 | Summer 2018 | Acoustics Today | 65