Fletcher, "Auditory Perspective — Basic Requirements" (1934)

Summary

Harvey Fletcher's own paper opening the 1934 AIEE symposium on auditory perspective — the technical literature of the Bell Labs stereophonic program, published under Fletcher's name rather than described by a later biography. It sets out the requirements for picking up an orchestra, carrying the signal a long distance, and reproducing it in a large hall.

Useful Claims

• The paper of record is Fletcher, H., "Auditory perspective — Basic requirements", Electrical Engineering, vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 9–11, January 1934. DOI 10.1109/EE.1934.6540356.
• Fletcher is the sole author, affiliated to Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., New York. The stereophonic work is his in the technical record, not only in retrospective accounts.
• The abstract states the paper's subject as "the fundamental requirements involved in a system capable of picking up orchestral music, transmitting it a long distance, and reproducing it in a large hall" — the Philadelphia-to-Washington problem, stated as an engineering brief.
• It is explicitly the first paper of a symposium, not a standalone result. The companion papers in the same series are Steinberg and Snow, "Auditory perspective — Physical factors" (DOI 10.1109/EE.1934.6540357), which reports that good auditory perspective is obtainable with two or three channels rather than the ideal infinite number, and Wente and Thuras, "Auditory Perspective — Loud Speakers and Microphones" (DOI 10.1109/T-AIEE.1934.5056477, carried in Transactions of the AIEE rather than Electrical Engineering), which treats the transducers used in what it calls "the Philadelphia-Washington experiment".

Reliability Notes

Primary tier by type, with one caveat worth stating rather than hiding: Electrical Engineering was the AIEE's own journal and these papers were presented at the AIEE Winter Convention in 1934. That is the contemporary professional-society literature and it is where this work was published, but 1930s AIEE practice is not modern anonymous peer review, and the peer-reviewed tier should be read as "the technical literature of record" rather than as a modern refereeing claim.

Confidence is Medium because the article body has not been retrieved — IEEE Xplore is paywalled. The bibliographic facts above come from the Crossref record for the DOI, and the quoted abstract line from the publisher's abstract. No figure or date from the demonstration is asserted here. The April 27, 1933 Constitution Hall demonstration, the three-channel configuration, the frequency response achieved, and the 1931–1932 recording sessions are all claims the fact page makes from other sources; none of them is carried by this page, and none should be added to it without the article text in hand.

Related Pages

• Harvey Fletcher and Stereophonic Sound