William M. Hartmann

Who is William M. 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. Working with junior colleagues, he discovered several major pitch effects: the binaural edge pitch, the binaural coherence edge pitch, the 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.

Hartmann was born in Elgin, Illinois,USA on 28 July 1939. He studied electrical engineering and physics at Iowa State University in Ames, IA,. Supported by a Rhodes Scholarship he studied theoretical physics with Sir Roger Elliott at Oxford University in England. He continued research in condensed matter theory as a post-doctoral scholar at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne Illinois.

In 1968 Dr. Hartmann joined the Department of Physics at Michigan State University in East Lansing where he is still employed as a professor of physics.