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WILLIAM MORRIS HARTMANN
William M. Hartmann is a noted physicist, psychoacoustician, author, and former president of the Acoustical Society of America. His major contributions in psychoacoustics are in pitch perception, binaural hearing, and sound localization. He has discovered major pitch effects including the binaural edge pitch, pitch shifts of mistuned harmonics, and the harmonic unmasking effect. His textbook, Signals, Sound and Sensation, is widely used in courses on psychoacoustics. He is currently a professor of physics at Michigan State University.

William M. Hartmann was born in Elgin, Illinois on 28 July 1939, first son of Walter and Marguerite Hartmann. He was educated at St. John's Lutheran school in Elgin, River Forest Junior High School in River Forest Illinois, and at Oak Park and River Forest High School (class of 1957). He studied electrical engineering and physics at Iowa State University in Ames, IA, (BSEE 1961). Supported by a Rhodes Scholarship (Iowa and Lincoln, 1961) he studied theoretical physics with R.J. Elliott at Oxford University in England (D.Phil. - condensed matter theory 1965). He continued research in condensed matter theory as a post-doctoral scholar at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne Illinois (1965-1968).

In 1968 Dr. Hartmann joined the Department of Physics (now the Department of Physics and Astronomy) at Michigan State University in East Lansing where he is still employed as a professor of physics. His work in condensed matter theory primarily involved lattice vibrations (phonons) in defective crystals and the theory of the electron-phonon interaction in metals and semiconductors. In 1974 he began teaching an undergraduate course on musical acoustics which inspired his interest in human hearing. In 1976 he spent a sabbatical year at Harvard University working with Professor David M. Green learning psychoacoustics. He has continued to work in that field, in musical acoustics, and in signal processing since that time. He has been an adjunct professor in the MSU Department of Psychology since 1979.

In 1981-82 Dr. Hartmann worked as a visiting scientist at the Institute for Research on Acoustics and Music (IRCAM) in Paris. He subsequently served at IRCAM as acting director of acoustics (1982-1983) and, supported by a NSF-CNRS grant, as consultant (1983-1987).

He is a member of the American Physical Society, the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, He was an associate editor of Music Perception from 1988-1997. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the Springer series Modern Acoustics and Signal Processing. In 2001 Dr. Hartmann received the Distinguished Faculty Award from Michigan State University and the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal from the Acoustical Society of America.

Dr. Hartmann's published work in psychoacoustics deals with pitch perception, signal detection, modulation detection, and localization of sound. He has written one textbook, Signals, Sound, and Sensation (published by Springer-Verlag - AIP Press, 1997). Another textbook, Principles of Musical Acoustics, is in preparation. He is the author of over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and the holder of several patents.

Dr. Hartmann has been a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America since 1983. He was chairman of the Technical Committee on Musical Acoustics from 1980 to 1984. From 1992-1995 he served on the Society's Executive Council and was chairman of the External Affairs Administrative Council (1994-1995). He gave the Society Tutorial at the spring meeting in 1996 entitled, "Pitch, Periodicity and the Brain." He served as vice president of the Society (1998-1999) and as president (2001-2002). As president, he worked to enhance the Society's connections with allied organizations such as the Institute for Noise Control Engineering, and to expand the Society's international presence.