Manfred R. Schroeder: Challenge the present and there is a better way. Free

I worked with Manfred Schroeder for about 25 years at Bell Telephone Laboratories starting in May 1961. The entrance hall of the Bell Labs building at Murray Hill, NJ had an inscription attributed to Alexander Graham Bell that said “Leave the beaten track and you will find something you have seen never before.” Manfred always inspired me to look for things one has never seen before. Digital computers were emerging in the 1960s with great promise and we used computers to do many new things: simulation of acoustics of concert halls, studying sound decay in rooms using ray tracing, and producing high‐quality speech at low bit rates. This paper will highlight a few examples. Manfred had been deep in the area of vocoder research then, but we started on a new track leading us ultimately to code‐excited linear prediction. This set the spark for expanding the use of cell phones worldwide. As a manager, Manfred Schroeder was uncompromising in pushing for scientific excellence resulting in success; Bell Labs had a fearsome reputation of being the best.