Page 84 - Summer 2021

Obituary
Gerald A. Studebaker, 1932–2018
Gerald A. “Jerry” Studebaker was born on July 22, 1932, in Freeport, IL, and died at age 86 in Memphis, TN, on September 2, 2018. With Jerry’s death, the Acoustical Society of America
(ASA) and the hearing health community lost one of their eminent scientists and educators.
Jerry graduated from Illinois State Normal University (Normal) in 1955 and then attended Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY) where he obtained his PhD in audiology in 1960. These university programs provided Jerry with two fundamental foundation piers on which he based his research. The program in Illinois, under the influence of Raymond Carhart and radiating from nearby North- western University (Evanston, IL), made him a new-age, technology-driven audiological scientist, while the pro- gram in Syracuse built in him the always present quest for scientific precision. His laboratory staff and his graduate students, much like him, were also an eclectic mixture of these same traits.
Jerry started his academic career as a lecturer in audi- ology at Syracuse University in 1961 and continued as an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma (Norman) in 1962 and professor at the Speech and Hearing Center, Memphis State University (MSU; Memphis, TN) in 1972. He moved to the City Uni- versity of New York (New York, NY) in 1976 and returned to MSU in 1979 as a distinguished professor. He retired in 2005.
Jerry made his name early by his work on masking techniques in clinical audiology. From 1962 through 1973, he published articles that took clinical masking, probably the most critical link for accurate audiological measurements, from the level of art to a clearly defined set of physical stimuli and clinical procedures. There was barely anything when he started, and all was com- plete when he finished.
From about 1974 to 1986, Jerry and his associates and stu- dents worked with that same diligence on the acoustical characterization of hearing aids, measurement methodol- ogy for hearing aid processed speech, and the influence of the environment on hearing aid performance. This work was instrumental for the appropriate design of flexible digital hearing aids that were on the horizon.
From 1982 to 2005, Jerry joined a group of researchers at other universities worldwide to work on the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII). The SII is a radically modified Articulation Index (AI) that is able to address nonlinear applications, various types of speech other than nonsense syllables, and hearing loss. Jerry and his research group focused on deriving basic SII parameters (in particu- lar, band importance and transfer functions) for a large number of different speech tests used in audiology.
Jerry’s research was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants for more than 25 years. He was a recipient of the Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award by the NIH in 1984 and a Research Career Award from the American Academy of Audiology (AAA) in 1990. He was elected a Fellow by the American-Speech-Language- Hearing Association in 1969, by the ASA in 1990, and by the American Academy of Audiology in 1990.
Selected Publications by Gerald A. Studebaker
Studebaker, G. A. (1964). Clinical masking of air and bone con- ducted stimuli. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 29, 23-25.
Studebaker, G. A., and Sherbecoe, R. L. (2002). Intensity-importance functions for bandlimited monosyllabic words. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 111, 1422-1436.
Studebaker, G. A., Cox, R. M., and Wark, D. J. (1978). Earmold modifications effects measured by coupler, threshold, and probe technique. Audiology 17, 173-186.
Studebaker, G. A., Pavlovic, C. V., and Sherbecoe, R. L. (1987). A fre- quency importance function for continuous discourse. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 81, 1130-1138.
Written by:
Chaslav Pavlovic chas@sii.to
BatAndCat Sound Labs, Palo Alto, California
84 Acoustics Today • Summer 2021