Gunnar Fant

Who was Gunnar Fant?

Carl Gunnar Michael Fant was professor emeritus at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He was a 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, unusual at the time.

Gunnar Fant's work led 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 competed with Walter Lawrence's Parametric Artificial Talker in creating lifelike speech synthesis.

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

Gunnar Fant received honorary doctorates from the Grenoble University and from Stockholm University, and several other awards, such as the Swedish Academy Margit Påhlson award, and the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. He was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.