Carl Gunnar Michael Fant (born October 8 1919), professor emeritus at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. First cousin of George Fant .

Gunnar Fant received a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1945. He specialized in the acoustics of the human voice, measuring formant values, and continued to work in this area at Ericsson and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also took the initiative of creating a speech communication department at KTH, considered rather unique at the time.

Gunnar Fant's work lead to the birth of a new era of speech synthesis with the introduction of powerful and configurable formant synthesizers. In the 1960s, Gunnar Fant's Orator Verbis Electris (OVE) competed with Walter Lawrence 's Parametric Atrificial Talker (PAT) in creating very life-like speech synthesis.

In later years, Gunnar Fant has remained active in the area of speech synthesis, focusing mainly on research on prosody.

Gunnar Fant has received honorary doctorates from the Grenoble University (1978) and from Stockholm University (1988), and several other awards, such as the Swedish Academy Margit Påhlson award, and the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.

References

• Dennis H. Klatt (1987) "Review of text-to-speech conversion for English". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 82, No. 3, September 1987, pp. 737--793.

External links

• Gunnar Fant's web page
• Audio clips from Dennis Klatt's "Review of text-to-speech conversion for English"