IPDS - History

A brief history of the IPDS

chair in phonetics set up in 1970

Klaus J. Kohler (lecturer and professor at the Institute of Phonetics and Communication Research at the University of Bonn) appointed to chair on 23.6.71
inaugural lecture "Was ist Phonetik eigentlich?" (What is phonetics?), 29.11.1972

Institute of Phonetics Juli´71-´72, Dänische Str.15, Kiel

independent institute of phonetics set up in 1971
establishment of courses in phonetic studies

M.A. as principal or subsidiary subject
doctorate
additional subject for degrees in computer studies and psychology

service courses for

department "Deutsch für Ausländer" (German for foreigners)
department of Romance languages
German department
Department of General Linguistics
the Kiel Logopedics School

establishment of a laboratory for speech signal processing 1972-1978
acquisition of the first computer financed by the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) in 1978
construction of a network of phonetic workstations financed by the state of Schleswig-Holstein and the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT) in 1985-1991
1986 expansion of the institute's name to "Phonetics and Digital Speech Processing" to take into account the modern theoretical and methodological orientation of phonetics

several DFG-supported research projects 1971-1989

word- and sentence-level phonetics

of High German
of Low German
of English (also contrastively to German)
of French

for speech melody in German: development of the "Kiel Intonation Model" (KIM)

cooperation contracts with the Department of Speech Communication and Music Acoustics at the Technological University of Stockholm and the company Infovox/Stockholm (1987-1990) for the development of a machine for the automatic conversion of written German texts into speech sounds; application in dealing with the disabled, especially the blind.
integration into the VERBMOBIL project, financed by the Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (BMBF), with participation of around 30 academic and industrial partners, for the development of a portable translating machine for German-English business dialogues (1990-1996)
HCM-project from the EU "Phrase Level Phonology": comparing phonetics of European languages 1994-1996
series of publications "Arbeitsberichte des Instituts für Phonetik und digitale Sprachverarbeitung" (AIPUK) (working papers from the IPDS) from 1973 (volume 32, November 1997)
publication of the database from Kiel on CD-ROM "The Kiel Corpus of Read/Spontaneous Speech" from 1994
3 international conferences at the IPDS Kiel

1979: financed by the DFG (German Research Council): interdisciplinary colloquium "Time in the Production and Perception of Speech"
1989: financed by the state of Schleswig-Holstein: conference of the International Phonetic Association for the revision of the International Phonetic Alphabet; the meeting is known in the literature as "the Kiel Convention" and the revised IPA has become the new standard
1996 (14/15 July) with finance from the DFG and the state of Schleswig-Holstein: symposium "Sound Patterns of Connected Speech"
2000 (08.-11. Okt.) with finance from the DFG and the state of Schleswig-Holstein: Symposium "Patterns of speech sounds in unscripted communication: Production - Perception - Phonology"

Participation in the Erasmus programme (continued under Socrates): European network "Phonetics and Speech Communication"; close cooperation with Scandinavia (Copenhagen, Stockholm - University/ KTH, Helsinki), France (Sorbonne - Paris III, ENST), United Kingdom (Cambridge, York)