The Lecture Series
The Richard C. Heyser Memorial Lecture series was established in May 1999 by the AES Technical Council, the Board of Governors, and the Richard C. Heyser Charity Fund to honor his extensive contribution to the Society, and his ability to communicate new and complex technical ideas with great clarity and patience. The endowment brings eminent individuals to AES conventions to lecture in audio engineering and related fields.
List of Distinguished Lecturers
Photographs of Distinguished Lecturers
Time Delay Spectrometry: An Anthology
An anthology of the works of Richard C. Heyser on measurement, analysis and perception
Richard C. Heyser
(1931 – 1987)
Richard C. Heyser
Dick Heyser, AES president-elect when he died in 1987, was an active member of the AES for almost three decades. He served as AES Governor and at various times held all elected positions. A Chicago native, he received a B.S.E.E degree from the University of Arizona and an M.S.E.E. degree from the California Institute of Technology. In 1956 he joined Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked his entire career. His work involved communication and instrumentation design for all the major space programs at JPL, beginning with America’s first satellite, Explorer I.
Richard loved audio engineering. Although his job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was not directly involved in the field of audio engineering, he spent his vacations attending AES conventions and built an extensive acoustics laboratory in his home. He published a number of papers in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society and served as a reviewer for the Journal. A fellow of the AES and the Acoustical Society of America, he was awarded nine patents in the field of audio and communication techniques, including time-delay spectrometry. His friends and colleagues universally admired his creative mind, kindness, and modesty.
His own words, from the preface of the paper he was preparing at the time of his death, best express the compass he used in his research:
“Perhaps more than any other discipline, audio engineering involves not only purely objective characterization but also subjective interpretations. It is the listening experience, that personal and most private sensation, which is the intended result of our labors in audio engineering. No technical measurement, however glorified with mathematics, can escape that fact.”
Be sure to check out the Richard C. Heyser Audio Engineering And Acoustics Collection through the Columbia College Chicago archives.
