Adrian John Fourcin.
Adrian John Fourcin was born on 30 August 1927 in Primrose Hill, London. His father Victor was a French confectioner, a hobby that, together with joinery, Adrian enjoyed passionately alongside his lifelong interest in speech and hearing. Adrian studied for a BSc in Engineering at Northampton Polytechnic (City University), London, and completed a PhD on ‘Methods of Speech Channel Capacity Reduction’ in the Electrical Engineering Department at Imperial College, London, in 1953.
His supervisor was the Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian scientist, Dennis Gabor. After winning a University of London fellowship, Adrian then continued his interest in speech, working on complex signal-based speech bandwidth compression at the Centre Nationale d’Etudes de Télécommunications Issy les Moulineaux France with P Marcou and J Daguet.
Between 1955 and 1960, Adrian worked for the General Electrical Company on radio transmitter calibration and new test methods for television, and then as a senior scientific officer at the Signals Research and Development Establishment, working with the influential English speech scientist and engineer Walter Lawrence. Adrian was then appointed as a lecturer and reader to the Department of Phonetics at University College London (UCL) culminating in a chair of experimental phonetics and Head of the Phonetics/Speech Sciences Laboratory, a position he retained until 1997.
One of Adrian’s most notable achievements, together with John West, was the invention and development of the guard-ring Laryngograph in the early 1960s. The Laryngograph is form of electroglottograph which is a non-invasive device that provides frequency and contact data about the vibratory pattern of the vocal cords, the sound source of voice which is isolated from distortion in the acoustic signal. Working with Evelyn Abberton, Adrian developed a vocal fold derived ‘pitch’ display and a range of voice measurements not only for sustained vowels but – innovatively at the time – also for connected speech, which is better approximated to real-life voice production in both health and disease. Demand, and a desire to make the Laryngograph available to researchers and clinicians, led to the formation of the Laryngograph company in 1971.
The Laryngograph played a pivotal role in Adrian’s other interest in the perception of hearing. He and his colleagues identified that speech could be reduced from a complex broad-spectrum acoustic signal into essential components – such as the fundamental frequency and the overall amplitude (loudness) contour – while replacing noisy consonantal friction with low-frequency band-limited random noise signals. These resulting speech-pattern elements could then provide temporal markers to assist lipreading.
By ‘Feature Mapping’ – transmitting these specific parameters (pitch, rhythm, and frication) – they were able to match these pattern elements to the patient's residual sensory capabilities. In the late 1970s, this work led to collaboration with other researchers at UCL, Ellis Douek at Guy’s Hearing Research Group, and Brian Moore in Cambridge and to the development of a novel approach in the design of early extracochlear (outside the cochlea) single-channel implants.
Adrian also pioneered the use of real-time visual biofeedback displays for speech therapy interventions and in speech training protocols for the deaf, as used at the Mary Hare School for the Deaf. Later in his career, he co-developed methods of applying Laryngograph technology to trigger and display synchronised captured stroboscopic images to the electroglottographic waveform and in the non-invasive monitoring of the oropharyngeal phase of swallowing. Adrian's work essentially moved speech science from purely theoretical linguistic study to a practical, clinical science that is not only valuable in research settings but also in ENT and speech therapy clinical practice.
Adrian was a Fellow of the Institute of Acoustics, a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association, The British Voice Association, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College Speech and Language Therapists. He was awarded the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Medal for Scientific Achievement for his extraordinary contributions to the field of speech communication science, the Quintana award for engineering contributions to the study of voice by the American Voice Foundation and the Edith Whetnall Memorial Medal awarded by the Royal Society of Medicine to outstanding professionals in the fields of otology and audiology Medicine. With his unique understanding of speech production and perception, links with academic and medical centres around the world, an engineering background and lifelong scientific curiosity, Adrian has been a pivotal figure in speech and hearing science. He published over 130 articles on various aspects of hearing, speech, language and voice science and successfully supervised 20 PhD students. Adrian’s last work was on speech evolution, which he continued until the very last months of his life, and focused on the deeply rooted, shared biological mechanism for how acoustic signals are structured and paced across mammals, birds and insects.
He is survived by his second wife Evelyn Abberton, his daughters Ann-Clare and Sylvie from his first marriage to Claire née Le Treis, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his daughter Joëlle in 2020.
Julian McGlashan, Sylvie Fourcin, Ann-Clare Fourcin
