The sound of a legacy
Former physics professor endows $2 million physics chair
William Hartmann’s passion for research took him from the hallowed halls of Oxford University to the bustling Parisian streets. But when he came to East Lansing, he knew he was home.
The MSU professor emeritus of physics mentored generations of students and published hundreds of papers throughout his 54 years of tireless service. Now, he’s giving back to the university where he built a prestigious career in psychoacoustics.
“This university has been very good to me over the years,” Hartmann said. “The gift seemed like a good idea.”
Hartmann’s $2 million gift will establish the new William M. Hartmann Chair of Physics. This donation will help fund research and ensure that Hartmann’s legacy continues for years to come.
Endowments are a crucial tool for ensuring continued excellence at MSU, supporting quality teaching, research and outreach even in the inevitable ebbs and flows of the economy. They help MSU attract world-class faculty by providing a steady and permanent source of income.
Photo credit: Paul Henderson
Thanks to Hartmann’s generosity, the Department of Physics and Astronomy will continue to have a lasting impact.
“We are deeply grateful to Bill for his long and distinguished career at our university, and for the many ways he’s advanced the field of psychoacoustics,” College of Natural Science Dean Eric Hegg said. “His generous gift will ensure the physics department’s continued strength for years to come. Endowed professorships are among the most powerful ways to ensure the long-term excellence of a department and leave a lasting legacy on the entire scientific community.”
An unexpected career shift
Hartmann didn’t come to MSU planning to work in psychoacoustics. In fact, that wasn’t even his background. He arrived on campus in 1968 fresh from Oxford University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Argonne National Laboratory as a condensed matter physicist.
At the time, the U.S. was embroiled in the Vietnam War. Too many students associated physics with making bombs, and class enrollment dwindled. Faculty members called a department meeting and brainstormed new courses that could draw students back to physics. That’s when Hartmann volunteered to teach musical acoustics on one condition — he needed the department to buy him a synthesizer.
The sudden suggestion wasn’t out of nowhere, though. Hartmann grew up learning to play the piano and, later, the trumpet. When he discovered jazz in high school, he was hooked. He joined a jazz group and played paying gigs at dances and events throughout his undergraduate college years. While he no longer played by the time he taught at MSU, acoustics seemed like a natural fit.
The physics department made good on its promise and bought Hartmann a synthesizer with enough sounds to emulate a whole orchestra. With the help of a National Science Foundation grant, Hartmann launched a new area of study.
“Michigan State University is a great place,” Hartmann said. “I especially appreciated the university letting me change fields the way I did. It’s not the sort of thing you can regularly do.”
The science of sound
Hartmann fell even deeper in love with acoustics when he visited his first Acoustical Society of America conference. He was struck by how friendly the people were, and everything he learned was interesting. Eventually, he shifted his research to psychoacoustics — the science of how we hear sounds and how our brain interprets them.
He dove into writing mathematical models explaining how human ears determine where sound is coming from, a process called sound localization. He was fascinated by the concept that sounds arrive at the ears, and how neurons respond mind-bendingly fast.
“There’s nothing else in the human body or brain that can work that quickly,” Hartmann said.
Those same questions could be applied to animal hearing, and how the size of their ears compared to their heads affected their ability to localize sound. His work is different from physiological acoustics, which examines the auditory hardware, such as the mechanical area, the cochlea and the neural circuits which turn sound waves into electrical signals in the brain. Psychoacoustics is like the software of the brain that interprets those signals.
Hartmann’s work led to numerous published papers and eventually two textbooks, one on the mathematics of psychoacoustics and the other on elementary musical acoustics. He also forged an interdisciplinary partnership with Brad Rakerd, then a communicative sciences and disorders professor at the MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences.
Together, they studied sound localization at the college’s anechoic room – which literally means “without echoes.” This room is lined with 90-cm foam wedges on all six surfaces,, with a suspended metal cable floor. For 30 years, they conducted experiments on sound location and how both ears work together to make sense of a sound.
Hartmann’s work didn’t go unnoticed. He was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as the Acoustical Society of America, where he eventually became president. In 1981 through 1985, he commuted between East Lansing and Paris, where he researched at the Institute for Research and Coordination of Acoustics/Music and served as the acting director of acoustics. In 2001, he received MSU’s Distinguished Faculty Award and the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal from the Acoustical Society of America.
Leaving a legacy
Gifts like Hartmann’s help ensure that future physicists will have a chance to dive deep into research and make important discoveries.
“I and the whole department are extraordinarily grateful to Professor Hartmann for endowing a chair in physics,” Physics and Astronomy Chair Steve Zepf said. “We have already seen the great impact of our current endowed chairs putting us in the forefront of cutting-edge areas of physics and raising our profile among the top physics departments in the country. The endowed William Hartmann chair will enable us to make a great and ongoing impact in key physics fields.”
Today, Hartmann is retired – but he’s not letting a little thing like that slow him down. He continues to work in his lab and still publishes papers. MSU was his home for more than 50 years. It will always have his heart.