Dayton Clarence Miller was born on March 13, 1866, in Ohio, and died on February 22, 1941. He was a physicist, astronomer, and acoustician.

Carl Emil Seashore was born Carl Emil Sjöstrand on January 28, 1866, in Mörlunda, Sweden, and died on October 16, 1949, in Lewiston, Idaho.

Stumpf studied at the University of Würzburg—first aesthetics and law, and later philosophy with Franz Brentano. Because Brentano had not completed the qualifications allowing him to supervise dissertations, Stumpf wrote his doctoral thesis on Plato (1868) and his habilitation thesis on mathematical axioms (1870) at the University of Göttingen, supervised by Hermann Lotze. Both philosophers had a strong influence on Stumpf’s thinking and further writings.

Wilhelm Doegen was born in Berlin. He studied economics, law, history, languages, and phonetics at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin (today Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), and in Oxford with the linguist and philologist Henry Sweet. After travels in France and England and a voluntary year in the military, he started teaching at secondary schools in Berlin in 1905. Focusing more and more on phonetics and prosody, Doegen published teaching materials for language learning and pronunciation.

Picture: Professor Michael Wertheimer

Karl Rudolph Koenig (also known as Rudolf Koenig or König) studied at the University of Königsberg. In about 1852, he moved to Paris and joined the workshop of famous violin-maker Jean Baptiste Vuillaume. In his leisure time, Koenig attended public lectures and studied mechanics, becoming increasingly interested in acoustics research. After six years of apprenticeship with Vuillaume, Koenig became a master violin-maker, but his own new business was a workshop for acoustic apparatus.

Son of a musician and a voice teacher, Pierre Schaeffer received a Catholic education, practiced theater as a boy scout, and learned to play the cello at the conservatory in Nancy. He chose to pursue engineering, gaining admission to the Polytechnique in 1929, where he continued his work in theater, followed by studies at the Supélec (top-ranked graduate school for electrical engineering).

Günter Tembrock (1918-2011) was the founder of the first German “Research Center for Animal Psychology” in Berlin in 1948 and is considered the most important researcher in the field of behavioural biology in the GDR. Even though he worked on a comprehensive understanding of the fundamentals of animal behaviour, his special interest was in mammals. He conducted his first behavioural studies on a female chimpanzee at the Berlin Zoo, which formed the basis for his book “Grundzüge der Schimpansen-Psychologie” (Fundamentals of Chimpanzee Psychology), published in 1949.