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{{Infobox Academic/Inventor/Entrepreneur |birthname = | name = Francis Fan Lee | image = | imagesize = 200px | caption = | birth_date = (1927-01-27) January 27, 1927 | birth_place = Nanjing, China | Nationality = [[US Citizen |1954|11|15}} |field = Engineer }}

Francis Fan Lee was born (Chinese name: characters) in Nanjing, China, January 27, 1927. During the Chinese Civil War, Lee came to the US and completed his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a US Citizen on November 15, 1954. An electrical engineer, he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [citation] and the founder of Lexicon, Inc. [citation]

Education MA

1953-54 Lee, Francis F., Project 7163 (2 notebooks) 1953-1954 Guide to the Records of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Servomechanisms Laboratory, 1940-1959

AC.0151

Finding aid prepared by Elizabeth Andrews, Judith Janec, Denis Meadows (May 02, 2014) Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute Archives and Special Collections, p.36 http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-ac/pdf/ac151.pdf

MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory Gordon S. Brown 1939-1952 "A significant postwar project that began in 1949 and continued and evolved through the 1950s was the work that led to numerical control of machine tools. Under a contract with the Parsons Company of Michigan, William M. Pease and James O. McDonough designed an experimental numerically-controlled milling machine which received directions through data on punched paper tape. The first working model of a continuous-path numerically-controlled milling machine was demonstrated in 1952". (http://libraries.mit.edu/mithistory/research/labs/mit-servomechanisms-laboratory/)

Lee left the Ph.D. program to work full time as a Research Engineer at the MIT Servomechanism Laboratory. When the Digitally Controlled Milling Machine was completed and delivered to the Giddings Lewis Milling Machine Company http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/giddings-lewis-inc-history/

1963, Project MAC started In 1963, Lee attended a conference about the MIT Project MAC / Multiple Access Computer, directed by Prof. Robert Fano. During this time with Project Mac, Lee produced the August 19, 1963 Project Mac memorandum MAC-M-99: “Study of Look-Aside Memory,” which was later presented at IEEE Computer Group conference in June 1969, in Minnesota http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsptp=&arnumber=1671174&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F12%2F35030%2F01671174.pdf%3Farnumber%3D1671174

A Marriage of Convenience: THE FOUNDING OF THE MIT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY, Stefanie Chiou, Craig Music, Kara Sprague , Rebekah Wahba The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory began in 1959 as a small group of research students, systems engineers and interested faculty. In 1963 the group joined Project MAC, an effort to bring together research groups from all over the Institute that were interested in computing. http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2001/AILab.pdf

In September 1964, Lee began as full-time PhD student at MIT. In November 1965, Lee completed his Ph.D thesis, “A Study of Grapheme to Phoneme Translation of English.” Supervisors Samuel J Mason Morris Halle http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/13462/25693629.pdf?sequence=1

Lee accepted MIT’s offer of Associate Professor with tenure. He was promoted to Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1968, and took an early retirement in 1991.

Inventions

1967-8 Digital Delay for medical heart monitoring Developing prototype. Lee believed his technique could be applied to and greatly improve EKG monitors. Digital delay unit for measuring heartbeat. Standard EKG monitor used a long persistence phosphor screen waveform, displayed as an electronic beam moving left to right, at which point a new trace starts from the very beginning. Lee’s method would allow a steady procession the EKG waveform, with no break. A display device that could provide a moving image on a cathode ray terminal (CRT). [from Francis]

To commercialize this invention required cost effective implementation – memory device. Lee found magno-restrictive delay line, appropriate for cyclic data and figured out how to extend its specs with suitable designed read/write amplifiers. Lee found a partner in Prof. Stephen Burns, strong interest in bio-medical electronics, fascinated by idea for EKG monitor, and who had contacts at Mass General Hospital where the prototype could be tested.

1968 Presents reading machine to public & press -- Varispeech Hired as Consultant for Honeywell in Lexington

United States Patent Inventors Francis Fan Lee Lexington; Stephen Kent Burns both of Cambridge, Mass. "Monitor method and apparatus for physiological signals and the like" US 3585440 A They completed prototype in two years, and filed with U.S. Patent Office on Jan 10, 1969, receives Patent June 15, 1971 Patent number: US 3585440 A. http://www.google.com/patents/US3585440

1969 Lee founded a company American Data Sciences with junior partner engineer Charles L. Bagnaschi to develop digital audio devices based on Lee's digital delay unit for medical heart monitoring

1969 "When Dr. Francis Lee at MIT devised the first digital delay circuit in 1969, his plan was to use it for use in heart monitors and possibly even speech-learning tools. He formed Lexicon with engineer Chuck Bagnashi for that reason, but his teaching assistant, Barry Blesser, had the idea of running audio through the circuit. The successful experiment caught the attention of Gotham Audio who saw digital delay as a potential pre-delay circuit for the EMT plate reverbs that they were distributing in America. Gotham licensed the design, and in 1971, introduced the pro audio industry to the Delta T-101, the very first digital signal processor. Lexicon would stay true to their original course offering a language-learning aide in the Varispeech Model 27Y, designed to correct pitch after a tape was slowed down, in order to study the words spoken. Used by itself, the device became popular in the music world providing digital pitch-shifting, a few years before the famous Eventide H910 harmonizer. Meanwhile, Barry Blesser left his MIT associates to work with EMT and created the sci-fi looking EMT250, the first production-model digital reverb, introduced in 1976. http://www.dangerousmusic.com/learning-center/signal-processing Dangerous Music

1971 ADS, originally housed over a bank in Lexington, Massachusetts, became Lexicon, Inc. http://blogs.telosalliance.com/under-the-hood/audio-time-management-for-radio The Telos Alliance “Under the Hood” “What You Need to Know About Audio Time Management for Radio,” Neil Glassman Delay goes digital Attempts at improving audio delays include work at Bell Labs in the 1950s using early analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters. The first viable digital delay — and the first commercial digital audio processor — was released in 1971. Developed by Francis Lee and Barry Blesser of MIT, the Delta T-101 was a breakthrough product from Lexicon, founded two years earlier

Steve Schoenherr, The Digital Revolution, “Digital Audio Revolution” Audio Engineering Society website http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/recording.technology.history/digital.html

Lee hired Ron Noonan in 1973 as CEO. Company went public in 1985 on the London Stock Exchange. 1995 was company sold to/merged with Harman International/Harman Karman Harmon International Industries

1971

“Lexicon was the initial brainchild of MIT professor Dr. Francis Lee, who had developed a digital delay unit for heartbeat monitoring. Went on to found American Data Services in 1969; changed name to Lexicon in 1971, when it appeared that there would be a future in digital technology for language instruction.”

The Routledge Guide to Music Technology, Thom Holmes (Routledge: 2006)

"Brought the industry its first digital audio processor in 1971, the offshoot of work started 2 years earlier by M.I.T. professor Dr. Francis Lee that resulted in a digital cardiac monitoring system." "the seminal product in what would within a decade become a digital industry.""Lexicon, Inc. was actually founded in 1969 by MIT Professor Dr. Francis Lee, who had developed a digital delay unit.” Billboard June 1, 1996 "Lexicon: Enhancing Pro Audio's Vocabulary for 25 Years," Dan Daley https://books.google.com/books?id=rwkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=lexicon+delta+digital+delay&source=bl&ots=xMLCufdAmZ&sig=YioF_T2gLs2mLiQUXx293u-Dnqo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VGmMVLvFIvH8sASLoIHIBA&ved=0CEQQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=lexicon%20delta%20digital%20delay&f=false

Sweetwater Sound Inc. Sweetnotes, Late Summer 1998 Issue http://www.sweetwater.com/publications/sweetnotes/sn-latesummer98/page-09.html <weird fact that I will need to confirm with my dad: ‘From the humble beginnings of the first Lexicon Delta digital delay, to the Prime Time I — Lexicon's unique digital delay device with detent knobs that selected only prime numbers as possibilities for delay times’ [1]

<weird fact that I will need to confirm with my dad: ‘From the humble beginnings of the first Lexicon Delta digital delay, to the Prime Time I — Lexicon's unique digital delay device with detent knobs that selected only prime numbers as possibilities for delay times’ [2]

One of the first discussions of time-domain digital pitch shifting can be found in a paper from a 1972 Audio Engineering Society convention: In this article, Francis F. Lee describes using digital storage to perform the same pitch shifting and time compression techniques that the older rotary tape head devices were used for. An interesting part of the article is when Lee describes the artifacts caused by splicing together the shifted chunks of audio. If the chunks are simply switched in between, the result is very obvious “clicks” in the sound. artifacts: With the rotating head machines, by making the tape wrap-angle slightly more than the nominal 90 degrees, it is possible to have signals picked-up by adjacent heads to have a degree of overlap. Furthermore, as the tape and head come into contact or separate, the picked-up signal does not come up or drop off abruptly. The no-signal or signal to no-signal transitions are faded in and out, although rapidly.

1972 Time Compression and Expansion of Speech by the Sampling Method Author: Lee, Francis F. A brief review of the historical development of speech time compression-expansion techniques and equipment. Recent advances in electronic circuitries, both analog and digital, have made it possible to construct low cost speech time compressor-expanders with good audio quality and very high reliability. Several such methods are discussed. AES E-Library Audio Engineering Society Affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Cambridge, MA JAES Volume 20 Issue 9 pp. 738-742; November 1972 Import into BibTeX Publication Date:November 1, 1972 http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=1793

Introduction of a Lexicon product for the language instruction market — the Varispeech, the first digital time-compression system. Varispeech-I is an electronic speech compressor developed by Professor Francis Lee, a member of the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at M. I. T., and manufactured by Lexicon, Inc., 60 Turner Street, Waltham, Massachusetts 02154. This compressor includes a cassette transport on which the signal to be compressed is reproduced, and a small, special-purpose computer which obtains from the input signal the samples that are reproduced consecutively in the compressed output. The device is also capable of speech expansion. The selling price of the Varispeech-I compressor is SI, 500. A more detailed description of the Varispeech-I appeared in Volume 6, Number 4 of the newsletter http://www.archive.org/stream/learningthroughl00cali/learningthroughl00cali_djvu.txt Learning Through Listening: applying listening skills through the curriculum Proceedings of a Special Study Institute Sponsored by the Division of Special Education CALIFORNIA STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION • Wilson Riles - Superintendent of Public Instruction • Sacramento, 1973 This publication, which was funded under provisions of Public Law 91-230, was edited and prepared for photo-offset production by the Bureau of Publications, California State Department of Education, and published by the Department, 721 Capitol Mall, Sacramento, California 95814. Distributed under the provisions of the Library Distribution Act

Its successor, the broadcast quality Model 1200, went on to win an Emmy in 1984. [Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound, ed. Frank Hoffman "One of the most important and influential producers of recording hardware"]

1973 Lee hired Ron Noonan as CEO. He realized that the company needed to diversify, and targeted the professional audio market. The breakthrough was the development of the 224, one of the first commercially viable digital reverb systems, shown at the AES Convention in 1978 and shipping the following year. Designed by David Griesinger, a Ph.D. physicist from Harvard who is still with the company, the 224 remained an industry standard until the 1986 introduction of its successor, the legendary Lexicon 480L. http://www.clynemedia.com/hsg/ces_1_07/Lexicon/35th_Anniversary/Lex_35thAnn_CES07.html

"Under the leadership of Ron Noonan, who joined as CEO in 1973, the company's product line expanded. The Lexicon 224 digital reverberation system was introduced in 1978, followed by the 224XL in 1983, which offered expanding processing and control via the innovative LARC remote controller." Billboard June 1, 1996 "Lexicon: Enhancing Pro Audio's Vocabulary for 25 Years," Dan Daley https://books.google.com/books?id=rwkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=lexicon+delta+digital+delay&source=bl&ots=xMLCufdAmZ&sig=YioF_T2gLs2mLiQUXx293u-Dnqo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VGmMVLvFIvH8sASLoIHIBA&ved=0CEQQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=lexicon%20delta%20digital%20delay&f=false

1978 Lexicon would finally define their legacy as makers of some of the world’s finest digital reverbs with their 224 Reverb in 1978." http://www.dangerousmusic.com/learning-center/signal-processing Dangerous Music

1981: Time Compressor Model 1200 audio-time compressor-expander (for making things fit in specific time slots—ad spots; also for creative uses. This is the device that won the Emmy: Sept 11, at Sheraton Center hotel, NATAS in New York: awarded Lexicon Inc: “For the development of the Lexicon Model 1200 Audio Time Compressor and Expander.” Reference: Broadcast Engineering: 1981-03-09-BC-OCR-Page-0147 http://www.americanradiohistory.com/hd2/Archive-BC-IDX/81-OCR/1981-03-09-BC-OCR-Page-0147.pdf#search=%22lexicon%20inc.%22

Reference: Broadcasting, 1984, September 17, page 129 http://www.americanradiohistory.com/hd2/Archive-BC-IDX/84-OCR/BC-1984-09-17-OCR-Page-0129.pdf#search=%22lexicon%20inc.%22

Awards/Honors http://tecfoundation.com/hof/04techof.html#17 TECnology Hall of Fame The TEC Foundation for Excellence in Audio established the TECnology Hall of Fame in 2004 to honor and recognize audio products and innovations that have made a significant contribution to the advancement of audio technology. Inductees to the TECnology Hall of Fame are chosen by a panel of more than 50 recognized audio experts, including authors, educators, engineers, facility owners and other professionals. Products or innovations must be at least 10 years old to be considered for induction. Below are the first 25 inductees. The awards were presented on October 29, 2004 in San Francisco, during the 117th Audio Engineering Society Convention.

Papers/Publications AES E-Library Audio Engineering Society Time Compression and Expansion of Speech by the Sampling Method A brief review of the historical development of speech time compression-expansion techniques and equipment. Recent advances in electronic circuitries, both analog and digital, have made it possible to construct low cost speech time compressor-expanders with good audio quality and very high reliability. Several such methods are discussed. Author: Lee, Francis F. Affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Cambridge, MA JAES Volume 20 Issue 9 pp. 738-742; November 1972 Import into BibTeX Publication Date:November 1, 1972

EXTERNAL LINKS

• Darden Smith's Official Website
• SongwritingWith:Soldiers Website
• The Be An Artist Program Website