ECHOES FROM THE ARCHIVES OF THE MUNICH SCHOOL OF PSYCHOACOUSTICS

Eberhard Zwicker founded the Institute of Electroacoustics at the TH Munich, now Technical University of Munich, in 1967 and was joined by the psychoacousticians Ernst Terhardt and Hugo Fastl and, for speech recognition, by Guenther Ruske. The subsequent two+ decades were a highly fruitful period for psychoacoustics in Munich, leading to what can now be viewed as the “Munich School of Psychoacoustics”: Research on peripheral auditory processes led to key contributions to spectral and temporal auditory masking and to measures of critical bandwidth (BARK bands), while work on non-linear cochlear processes, including otoacoustic emissions, resulted in a non-linear electric model of the cochlea. Terhardt's works on pitch, consonance and harmony were pioneering. Research on the percepts of sharpness, roughness and fluctuation strength laid the foundation for psychoacoustic sound quality. DIN 45631 and ISO 532b standardize Zwicker's loudness model and bridge to a wide array of applications of psychoacoustics. While I am too young to have met Eberhard Zwicker in person, I have “inherited” his personal and the institute document archives and will report on selected research outcomes.