Diane Kewley-Port

Lentz:

My name is Jennifer Lentz. Today’s date is June 6th, 2018, and we are at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A. The time is 11:30 a.m. and I am about to interview Diane Kewley-Port for the Acoustical Society of America. Her primary technical committees are Speech Communication and Psychological and Physiological Acoustics. All right, Diane. What is your present address?

Kewley-Port:

I live here in Bloomington, Indiana, and the address is [redacted].

Lentz:

And what is your present telephone number?

Kewley-Port:

[redacted].

Lentz:

OK, great. Who is your present employer?

Kewley-Port:

Well, actually, I’ve had two jobs over my career. How about if we start with Indiana University?

Lentz:

OK, that sounds great.

Kewley-Port:

I am retired from the speech and hearing department at Indiana University. Does that cover two things? That is two questions.

Lentz:

That’s OK. Yeah, yeah. What is your job title at Indiana University?

Kewley-Port:

Well, I am retired, so I am called professor emeritus.

Lentz:

OK. How long did you work there?

Kewley-Port:

In speech and hearing?

Lentz:

OK, so how long did you work at IU?

Kewley-Port:

Well, I started in the computer science department as an adjunct assistant professor, and that was in 1983. And then in 1987, I was hired by speech and hearing as an assistant professor and went through full professor.

Lentz:

Very cool. You mentioned that you have two employers. What is your other one?

Kewley-Port:

So, I founded a small business with another person from speech and hearing, Charles Watson, and a person from mathematics here at Indiana University, who’s Dan Maki. And that was 20 years ago, so — well, maybe 21 — so that would be 2000, I think.

Lentz:

How long were you with them?

Kewley-Port:

I was with Communication Disorders Technology for — well, I’m still — it’s still going on. I am the vice president of that company, and we do primarily research. It’s a small business that is looking to develop things in the area of improving disabilities that are encountered in speech or hearing. And this is continuing.

Lentz:

That’s exciting.

Kewley-Port:

Yeah, thank you.

Lentz:

All right. Related to the Acoustical Society, what year did you join the ASA?

Kewley-Port:

I believe I joined in 1967, which was when I went to my first meeting.

Lentz:

Wow. So, that’s 51 years so far.

Kewley-Port:

Yeah.

Lentz:

OK! What was your age and profession at that time? [laugh] Maybe you can leave off age, if you want to! [laugh]

Kewley-Port:

[laugh] OK! But I should have been 25 at that time, because it was in the fall. And I was in my first research assistant job at Johns Hopkins.

Lentz:

OK, very cool. And what area of acoustics were you interested in at that time?

Kewley-Port:

It was speech communication, and I was working in a language development lab.

Lentz:

What were your reasons for joining the ASA?

Kewley-Port:

Well, when I went there to the Miami meeting in 1967, I was just inspired by the research that I saw, the people that I met and I was able to talk to. It was a smaller meeting at that time, and I just felt so inspired to want to pursue my career in research. Because that hadn’t been decided at that time, but it sure was after that first meeting.

Lentz:

You were really inspired! Did you join the ASA after you went to the meeting, then?

Kewley-Port:

I don’t remember those details, but I think I joined right away. Because I was in that research position for a little over a year and participated in research that was being reported there. So, I was probably a second author or third author by the spring meeting.

Lentz:

Wow. Was there anyone in particular who encouraged you to join the ASA as well?

Kewley-Port:

No. I would say it was really the whole experience. The lab had about five PhDs in it, and they were very happy to have somebody with a master’s that was relevant to working in speech technology, which is really what they needed — a lot of recording, editing, things like that. So, the whole group at Johns Hopkins neuropsychology lab, I think is what it was called.

Lentz:

Wow. OK. So, with 51 years in the ASA I can also see that you’ve participated at a lot of levels in the Acoustical Society. So, let’s start with the committees. What ASA committees were or are you a member of?

Kewley-Port:

One of the first committees that I was involved with was being a joint representative of the ASA and ASHA to the Dennis Klatt Memorial Award committee. And that was from 1989 to ‘93. Because we were trying to actually set up a fund for — between the two societies. So, that took a while.

Lentz:

Can you also elaborate — what is ASHA?

Kewley-Port:

The American Speech and Hearing Association.

Lentz:

And then you were on other committees after that as well?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. And so this led to a committee that was set up to coordinate the Dennis Klatt Memorial Award in 2002. Dennis Klatt being a very important member of the Society and a personal friend.

Lentz:

Does the Society still have the Dennis Klatt Memorial Award?

Kewley-Port:

It does. It probably didn’t get enough funding to have it awarded very often. And then it kind of has to be awarded once to people in Acoustical Society and once to people in Speech and Hearing, unless we have people like myself that went back and forth.

Lentz:

I see.

Kewley-Port:

To continue, I was a member of the editorial board for the reprint collection called “Speech Communication Volume III, Speech Processing” and the ASA did publish that in 1991.

Lentz:

And I know that you have some other committees as well. Could you list them?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. So, in Indianapolis, we had an annual meeting, and I was on the steering committee then from about 2009 to 2014. I now had a series of committees that were involved in getting our publications online, not just in print. And the first was called the Ad Hoc Publishing Services Review Committee, from 2012 to 2017, followed by the Publication Policy Committee, 2012 to 2018. And then with all the online work, I now serve on the Web Advisory Committee, 2016 and still ongoing.

Lentz:

With respect to the web advisory committee, I guess they released a new logo just recently. Could you tell me a little bit more about your role in that?

Kewley-Port:

Well, I was on another ad-hoc committee to help hire the web developer that we have. It was the first professional person for designing our ASA web pages and maintaining them and all of that. And obviously, to do the design and he was relatively new, it was a good idea to have some regular members, just a small number, that could assist when that web developer, Dan Farrell, had questions. And so we started thinking about redesigning the website and almost immediately it popped out that our logo does not — from 1929, was not very visibly — could not be visualized very well online on the website. And so we said, “Well, it’s pretty hard to redesign the website without getting a logo as well.” But that took several years of finding out how to get into branding and a number of other issues.

Lentz:

Well, I can tell you — I was just at the Minneapolis meeting a month or so ago, and people are really excited about the new logo.

Kewley-Port:

Oh! That’s good to hear.

Lentz:

So, there’s a lot of great feedback about that logo. So, congratulations.

Kewley-Port:

Oh, well, thank you. It was quite a very interesting sort of deviation from things that I knew anything about, but one that I’m glad to know other people appreciate. [laugh]

Lentz:

All right. I’m going to pause. OK, so can you tell me a little bit about the elected offices that you’ve held within the ASA?

Kewley-Port:

Sure. The first office that I had was chair of the Speech Technical Committee, and that was from 2002 to 2004. Almost immediately, I was elected to be a member of the Executive Council, and so that lasted from 2005 to 2008. And, immediately, [laugh] I was elected to being vice president, and that was from 2008 to 2011.

Lentz:

I would also like to note that you’ve told me that you’ll be on the ballot for president in 2019.

Kewley-Port:

Yes, I was just told that I was elected.

Lentz:

Congratulations.

Kewley-Port:

This nominating committee let me know that recently.

Lentz:

OK, so you’ve also received a few awards from the Acoustical Society. Could you tell me what those are?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. I was made a Fellow in 1993, and then was awarded the Distinguished Woman of the Acoustical Society by the Women in Acoustics Committee in October 2014.

Lentz:

Did that coincide with the Indianapolis meeting?

Kewley-Port:

Yes, it did. It did. And then I was also selected as an associate editor for Speech Processing and Communication Systems from — and that goes back to 1987 to 1990.

Lentz:

I know that you’ve also done a lot of other work with the Acoustical Society with respect to some positions that you’ve held. Could you also tell me a little bit about those?

Kewley-Port:

Yes, definitely. Most of them have related to trying to improve our online publications platforms. This is not easy to go from print and to figure out how to get everything online. And so they asked me two different times to help. The first was 2010 to 2014, and then again since fall of 2016. So, I’m actually a paid consultant, and they asked me to do different tasks in regard to upgrading the web presence that we have for our journal articles.

Lentz:

That’s pretty exciting. It’s hard with technology and how fast it changes to keep everything modern.

Kewley-Port:

It certainly is. [laugh]

Lentz:

Yeah. [laugh] OK. So, in over 51 years, are there any particular ASA meetings that stand out as being something special to you?

Kewley-Port:

Well, I’ve already been talking about that first meeting in Miami. But I guess most of the rest of my memories, while they’re recent from the 2014 Indianapolis meeting, in terms of being very special I’d have to say that I was particularly honored to have a special session that was given by my colleagues and former students and former postdocs there, and that was a big highlight of my career. On the steering committee, I wound up being involved with our two —

Lentz:

OK, go ahead.

Kewley-Port:

I was primarily involved in designing the two social hours that we have. The one on Tuesday night, I did at a famous American museum called the Eiteljorg. And we left the Marriott Hotel and went over there and had the dinner outside on a beautiful fall day and got to see the museum. And the other was having a Halloween meeting, Halloween social rather, because it was October 29th. I thought that was close enough. And that may be the first, last, and only, but the students that helped me had a lot of fun with that.

Lentz:

I remember the students dressing up in costumes, and the pictures showing up on the ASA website at the time.

Kewley-Port:

Yeah.

Lentz:

And that’s the meeting that you were also honored by the Women in Acoustics Committee, correct?

Kewley-Port:

Yes.

Lentz:

So, I guess it was probably really special for all of those things to happen in Indianapolis, given you’ve lived in Bloomington for quite a long time.

Kewley-Port:

Yes. Oh, if I could just mention the Paris meeting. I didn’t go to very many of the international meetings, but I did go to the one in Paris. And I don’t have the exact date, but it was before Indianapolis — probably about 2012.

Lentz:

Yeah, probably.

Kewley-Port:

And that was really overwhelming, because they had expected about 2,500 people and got 5,000.

Lentz:

Wow.

Kewley-Port:

And it just was meeting a lot of my international colleagues and so stimulated by all the different activities. And I was still on the Executive Council, or maybe past president at the time or something, so that I didn’t have a lot to do with the coordination of that meeting, but was just very involved at all levels. A pretty amazing experience.

Lentz:

Yeah. I didn’t go to that meeting, but I heard that it was pretty incredible as well. So, are there any ASA members that you met over your time in the ASA that’s really influenced you?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. Well, Dennis Klatt, who I mentioned before, influenced me enormously, as he did a lot of people. He developed the first really high-quality speech synthesizer and made it available to researchers like myself, and free immediately. And then he went on and helped a small company make that synthesizer available to a lot of different people, whether it was for problems with blind people being able to have their email read — things like that. So, he stimulated me both in terms of my own research as well as founding a small business in order to make that research available to people who needed it.

Ken Stevens, who was president of the Society, was very important in every way in acoustic phonetic research, and I knew him well. He just was outstanding in being able to think through problems. How will we be able particularly to recognize speech, and thinking about the details. So, he was very influential. And not exactly a personal friend, but somebody I knew well. And then Katherine Harris at the City University of New York was probably — was my mentor for my PhD, and I also worked for her at Haskins Laboratories. She is a Gold Medal winner, and she’s one of the early absolutely outstanding women in the Acoustical Society.

Lentz:

Most definitely.

Kewley-Port:

And that was another person who really influenced my life.

Lentz:

Good role model, for sure. So, is there anything that you’d like to say about the ASA? Past, present, or future.

Kewley-Port:

Yes. I think the mentoring role that has sort of been a theme in what I’ve been saying is so important. And I’ve been told by people who attend more different societies than I have that it’s unusual that you can establish friendships with a more senior or mid-career scientist when you’re very young, and be mentored. And people will encourage you to ask them questions to help you develop your own research path. And I think that that is just an outstanding feature of the Acoustical Society that we really treasure and try today to keep mentoring the younger students when they enter, and early career scientists. As far as the — well, the whole time that the Acoustical Society has existed, I would have to say it’s the preeminence of the articles in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, which is rated over and over again as the top journal for acoustics. And that this is something we’re very proud of. We spend as much effort and time and money in the Society as we can to continue that outstanding performance. And I certainly want that to continue in the future.

Lentz:

Yeah. I think your work with the ASA on the publications committees over almost a decade kind of reinforces that, right?

Kewley-Port:

[laugh]

Lentz:

We’ll be touching on more issues related to your education and those kind of things, but just for documentation, besides the ASA, what other professional organizations have been important to your career?

Kewley-Port:

Well, I would have to say IEEE, since I was originally an undergraduate engineering degree. And when they developed the Signal Processing branch of that society, they had meetings that were stimulating to me, and publications. I really didn’t have any major publications there, but read them and found that I was incorporating the algorithms and all of that into my own research. And then the American Speech-Hearing Association — ASHA, as it’s known — that was important in my applied research, which had to do with thinking about the problems that hearing impaired people have for understanding speech, and developing one of the earliest computer-based speech training aids. A lot of research was conducted on it to see if we could help especially children who do not speak intelligibly.

Lentz:

I’ll probably ask you more about that a little bit later. All right, so let’s talk about your life before you went to college. So, when and where were you born?

Kewley-Port:

I was born in 1943, and in Cleveland, Ohio.

Lentz:

Did you live anywhere else before you entered college?

Kewley-Port:

No. I stayed in Cleveland. Moved to different suburbs, and Shaker Heights High School was where I wound up in high school.

Lentz:

What did your parents do?

Kewley-Port:

My mother was a stay-at-home mom, and she was very good at it. And my father was an engineer. And he was an engineer at Nela Park Lamp Works and inspired my interest in engineering.

Lentz:

Interesting. So, was he an electrical engineer, or a mechanical engineer, or do you not really remember?

Kewley-Port:

I don’t remember his engineering training. It was at the University of Michigan. And I honestly don’t know at that time exactly what the divisions were in the engineering school.

Lentz:

How would you describe yourself during that time?

Kewley-Port:

Well, I just was a very active kid. I was the oldest in the family. I loved outdoor things. And I turned to an interest in science really very early, in part maybe because my father, who does have patents in several different areas with lighting — flashbulbs and all kinds of different kinds of lighting — he talked to me about it. Inspired me.

Lentz:

Right. You sort of got that influence at home. So, did you always want to be an engineer, then?

Kewley-Port:

I think a scientist. But I wanted to be an engineer when I was in high school because I was encouraged by my high school teachers to attend a National High School Institute summer program at Northwestern University. And that was split between sciences, but particularly engineering. And they wanted to encourage youth to get involved. There were about seven women who went to that summer institute. And that for me was between my junior and senior year. And I definitely wanted to be an engineer after I went to Northwestern University. [laugh]

Lentz:

[laugh] It sounds like it also might have been pretty atypical for women to want to do those things at the time, as well? To be a scientist, engineer?

Kewley-Port:

Yeah, probably not so many in science, but very few in engineering.

Lentz:

Did you have hobbies or special interests, then, as well?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. Maybe it wouldn’t be too surprising that one of my hobbies was sewing. I learned to sew very well, and by the time I was in high school, I bought my own sewing machine, and I sewed all my major dresses, whether it was a prom dress or Sunday school dress. I enjoyed sewing.

Lentz:

Do you still enjoy sewing? I’m curious. [laugh]

Kewley-Port:

No, not as much, but I know how to do it. I now knit. [laugh]

Lentz:

Right. OK. So, were there things other than science in high school that you also enjoyed?

Kewley-Port:

Mostly athletics, and that would be field hockey and volleyball.

Lentz:

You had already mentioned this program at Northwestern, and it seemed to have a strong influence on you. Were there other aspects or people that maybe also influenced your career path?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. These two things kind of go together. It was primarily my teachers in the sciences, whether it was biology or chemistry and physics, that were inspiring me in high school. But there was this new kind of physics that was project-oriented called PSSC physics that came out for the first time when I was a senior. And one of our physics teachers took that on and there was just one class at that time. It was all very novel, because we did lab experiences every week. And so that was very central.

Lentz:

Interesting.

Kewley-Port:

I think that curriculum was developed at MIT, and then today we would call it project learning. And so that was very exciting. And that fall, I guess it was my physics teacher recommended me to attend the second National Youth Conference on the Atom. That was in Chicago. I’ll remind you I was in Cleveland. And there were eight students selected from all of Cleveland, Ohio, to attend that conference run by NSF. And that was my first airplane ride. So, altogether, I was very inspired by science and so forth. And I did earn at high school graduation the Science Achievement Award for the school at Shaker Heights High School.

Lentz:

Oh, very cool. How big was your high school?

Kewley-Port:

Well, the graduating class was over 600 —

Lentz:

Wow.

Kewley-Port:

— and 95% of the students went to college.

Lentz:

Wow. That’s incredible.

Kewley-Port:

At that time.

Lentz:

Yeah, yeah. Well, it sounds like there were a lot of people influencing you and encouraging you to pursue your dream of being an engineer.

Kewley-Port:

[laugh] Yeah.

Lentz:

So, it sounds like it happened as well.

[Session 1 ends – Beginning of Session 2]

Lentz:

OK, so this is the second interview with Jennifer Lentz and Diane Kewley-Port, and we are now talking about her college years. We’re going to start with undergraduate. Where did you first go to college and what was your major?

Kewley-Port:

Well, I went to the University of Michigan, and I was excited to be an engineer, and I picked science engineering for my undergraduate program, because there’s a lot of flexibility.

Lentz:

OK, interesting. I know you’ve talked a little bit about this, but could you give us some more information about why you went to the University of Michigan and why you picked engineering?

Kewley-Port:

Sure. I don’t know if this is repetition or not, but there was a science institute at Northwestern University, and it was an eight-week program. And it was specifically to attract young budding scientists to engineering, but they made sure there was a lot of regular science, too. And the professors at Northwestern University usually gave like a three-lecture sequence on their various expertise. And I just came away thinking engineering was fantastic. I thought the sciences otherwise were great, but I just loved it. I was very excited.

Lentz:

Sure, sure. So, why at the University of Michigan?

Kewley-Port:

I actually looked at a number of engineering schools including Purdue and Cornell. At least those two. I was interested in feeling like I could blend in, I could just be part of the campus. I knew there weren’t going to be many women engineers, but I wasn’t there to stick out. And my father had gone to the University of Michigan, so that’s certainly why it was on the list. But when I got there, I just felt like, “OK, this is a very diverse campus.” And so that’s why I picked it.

Lentz:

Right. Pretty big school, too. While you were there, did you ever change your major or…?

Kewley-Port:

Nope! [laugh]

Lentz:

Nope? Stuck with engineering the whole way?

Kewley-Port:

[laugh] Yes, yes.

Lentz:

Yeah. I’m kind of curious about the science engineering. How is that different from the other disciplines? Is it more broad or…?

Kewley-Port:

Well, for one thing at that time, they made the regular standard engineering sequences, such as math/calculus sequence, the electrical engineering sequence, from four semesters to three semesters. And this was true for, besides those two, a couple of others. Maybe just one semester for some kind of a mechanical engineering type program or course. So, that meant that by the time you got to your senior year, even later in your junior year, you had electives, and you could start to think about specializing.

Lentz:

I see.

Kewley-Port:

But the people who signed up were — since they saw this very rapid coursework that you were going to do, also tended to be very good students. So, it just worked for me. I wasn’t sure what kind of engineer I wanted to be, but I knew that I could sample different things, and that was great.

Lentz:

Cool. It sounds very flexible. So, while you were there, did you belong to any special clubs or participate in any activities that you might want to talk about?

Kewley-Port:

I don’t think that as described here, that I belonged in any special clubs. These were the ‘60s and I got into things related to the Great Society and social justice issues. So, that kind of comes up under another —

Lentz:

A little bit later.

Kewley-Port:

Yeah.

Lentz:

OK, so we can address that a little bit later. So, you did mention that there weren’t very many women in engineering, and I think I read that you were the only one in your class?

Kewley-Port:

I was the only woman who graduated. There were seven women who started. Our classes at Michigan in engineering were approximately 550 students. But by the sophomore year, I was the only one left, and there was no woman who went on for the class before or the class after. So, that made me one in 1,600 at that time. So, that was a —

Lentz:

Pretty unique experience.

Kewley-Port:

Yeah. But they made me feel welcome. I didn’t feel almost ever that either the guys were rude in the class and saying inappropriate things. I felt on the other hand welcomed. Made friends with a lot of them. That did help that there was science engineering, because we tended to go from class to class with one another, except for our electives, because of this rapid sequence. So, that helped. I wasn’t always just meeting new people. It was kind of a gang of about 35 of us that were in that program.

Lentz:

Cool, cool. So, while you were in college, was there anyone in particular who had an influence on you?

Kewley-Port:

So, I picked out two names here. The first one is Bruce Arden, and he is the person who developed the MAD computer language, which stands for Michigan Algorithm Decoder. And it was sort of a pre-Fortran. And in 1961, this was a one-credit class. Of course, it was on punch cards. And I took it. And it just got me off and running to really thinking that computer programming was the way to go. And he was a very exciting person. If Fortran was being developed at that time, it was right on the edge of being developed. So, it was really the first broadly taught class to any old student, especially freshmen, who wanted to take it. And it was just very exciting. So, he made me feel it was important. That’s one person. The other is for a job that I had primarily between my — in my junior summer. And I just felt very much that I loved my classwork, but I wanted to do some engineering. And so I stayed at the university in Ann Arbor over that summer, and I found a job at the High Altitude Laboratory. And the head of that laboratory was named Leslie Jones. And this laboratory is credited for developing a lot of both the devices and all of the computer algorithms for the Nimbus and the TIROS satellites.

Lentz:

Mmm!

Kewley-Port:

And so I was there to help do the programming. Most of that was in machine language.

Lentz:

OK, so let’s talk about the High Altitude Laboratory. Just kind of start over.

Kewley-Port:

All right. So, this was my job my junior summer. Stayed in Ann Arbor. And Leslie Jones was the head of that laboratory. That laboratory was very big in developing the Nimbus and the TIROS weather satellites. And I was a programmer for their computer in a bus. So, they put those — it’s called high-altitude because to test the satellites, they put them on a balloon that would actually go up between 12 and 20 miles above the earth, and they’d take their bus and run it underneath the satellites. And so your program had to work, because it was collecting telemetry data while it was driving as fast as it could in North Dakota or wherever they launched the thing. So, it was a pretty exciting thing. The very first weather satellites.

Lentz:

That’s cool.

Kewley-Port:

You start to hear a little bit in the weather reports, and here we were developing them. That was exciting. And then I continued to work a little bit that fall. And when I said, well, no, I wasn’t going to continue in this area, Leslie Jones sat me down and gave me a long story about why he thought I was very appropriate for this, and why spectrometry was going to be a really big wave in the future. So, really, what I was doing was predicting my interest in acoustics, because what we were looking at was all kinds of things, of course, about the light coming up from the earth and dividing it into appropriate spectral — in this case light frequencies. So, it was, you know, very important in several ways. Kind of my first professional job, and he — you know, he encouraged me as well.

Lentz:

So, his encouragement kind of kept you to stay in the field?

Kewley-Port:

Or to stay in research. To see how exciting research could be.

Lentz:

Yeah. So, why were you thinking about leaving at that time?

Kewley-Port:

Oh, I was graduating. I graduated a semester early.

Lentz:

Oh, you did? OK.

Kewley-Port:

Yeah. So, I graduated after my first semester senior year.

Lentz:

So, you worked there for a year, then?

Kewley-Port:

A summer and most of the fall. So, five, six months.

Lentz:

So, after you graduated —

Kewley-Port:

But it was full-time in the summer, so —

Lentz:

Sure. OK. So, you were gonna go home, I guess, after you graduated, or…?

Kewley-Port:

No, I did not go home. [laugh] I still thought it was a pretty cool idea to work in engineering. Even though I liked my experience there at Michigan, I said, “Well, I would like to go to Europe and be an engineer. Why not go there?” And I picked Denmark, because they did speak a lot of English. So, during that senior year, I was sort of looking around to see what kind of a job I might possibly get in Denmark. And it turns out that there was a small computer company in — in Danish it’s [unintelligible] and that means computer calculations, or calculator. And they had — they built a computer there, and in particular, one of their major founders, Peter Naur, had developed the ALGOL language, which was a forerunner of C. And so he was a very big person there. And I literally got off the plane, went and knocked on the door and explained that I just finished this undergraduate degree and I had done a lot of computer programming including that job, and would they have a position for me? And they said, “Oh, yes.” It was Friday. “You can start on Monday!” Never wrote them a letter. Nothing.

Lentz:

Wow. [laugh]

Kewley-Port:

And I said, “Oh! Boy, that’d be nice.” He said, “Well, but the thing is — ” I arrived on like January 5th after being home with my family for the holidays. And they said, “The thing is that tonight is our annual holiday party, and we think you should come to that, so that you can meet everybody in the small company.” In particular, I was going to go to the compiler group, and write compilers, since I had done already a lot of machine language. And so could I come to their party? Well, of course! [laugh]

Lentz:

[laugh]

Kewley-Port:

So, that was a yearlong — shall I continue about…?

Lentz:

Sure, sure. We can come back to some of your college days.

Kewley-Port:

That was a yearlong job. Oh, I didn’t even say that I had already decided to go to graduate school and get a master’s degree at Michigan. We can talk about that when we get to the master’s degree. So, I already planned to come to Michigan, but I wanted this year of work. And so I learned a lot about I guess especially writing compilers. But I loved Denmark. I learned Danish. And the last three months, instead of continuing to do what I was doing actually in Copenhagen, they were installing one of their computers — a gear computer out in Aarhus, on the peninsula, and they needed somebody to go out and kind of introduce this to the faculty there. And the computer was going in the physics department. And again, forecasting my interest in acoustics and physics — as a branch of physics. And so the last three months, I went out there. So, here I come as a girl of all of 22 years, who is going to show the professors in physics what a computer can do.

Lentz:

Wow.

Kewley-Port:

Pretty interesting.

Lentz:

Yeah. I bet!

Kewley-Port:

[laugh]

Lentz:

But kind of intimidating and exciting at the same time.

Kewley-Port:

Yes, especially since I hadn’t even gone to graduate school yet. So, here I was. And fortunately, there’s — they treated women completely equally in the workplace at that time, so that issue was not there. But I would have to say [laugh] I was pretty young.

Lentz:

Do you feel that you were received very well?

Kewley-Port:

Oh, yeah. I did.

Lentz:

Cool. Well, I think we skipped over a couple of topics, so let’s kind of go back to college. So, it sounds like you had a couple of pretty important professors in your life who sort of fostered your interest. But did you have a model outside of university?

Kewley-Port:

No. I don’t think so. I was going to talk about a model that was inside the university and inspired my graduate work.

Lentz:

Let’s talk about that one, then. Sure.

Kewley-Port:

So, again, science engineering allowed you to take various kinds of electives, and I picked one in communication sciences. And that was jointly developed by Gordon Peterson and June Shoup. And they had the idea that lots of things were connected that involved communication. And of course that would include language, language science, linguistics, whatever you wanted to call it. But actually psychoacoustics was being developed there, and so that was a part of the program. And then information theory was part of the program. And this was their introductory course. And when I took that, that’s where I really got interested in going to the University of Michigan graduate school, where then you took separate courses in all these different things that you were taught in the introductory course. And the fact that that was the first woman [laugh] who I had as a professor — June Shoup.

Lentz:

Wow, OK.

Kewley-Port:

And you know, just that was very inspirational. They were very well-recognized around the country as coming up with a new model for thinking about all kinds of ways that science needed to be looked at, including things like — I mean, what’s DNA? I mean, that’s communication between biological systems and their offspring or whatever way you want to look at it. And that was included in there. So, they were looking at all aspects of communication. And that’s [unintelligible].

Lentz:

Do you feel like that’s where you kind of got the big spark to go into communication sciences?

Kewley-Port:

Yeah.

Lentz:

Were you a junior at that time?

Kewley-Port:

That was my senior year. And I was able to apply to go then to graduate school the next year. Because I had already decided I was going to Denmark. [laugh]

Lentz:

OK, yeah. [laugh] You’re just gonna go. [laugh]

Kewley-Port:

Just go. You know?

Lentz:

Very adventurous. Not everybody could do that. So, you had mentioned that the Civil Rights Movement was going on when you were in college. So, would you like to talk a little bit more about your…?

Kewley-Port:

Sure. So, I started in ‘61. I graduated in ‘64 — as I say, a little bit early. And at the University of Michigan is one of the places where SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, was founded. And they were very much into racial justice and war on poverty, other aspects of social justice. And especially with the inhumane treatment, really, of African Americans at that time in this country, there were many things going on that way as well. So, this group was founded on several different campuses. It was rather revolutionary. And there was a lot, especially in the South when there would be various groups that would go down and march for racial equality. A lot of pushback on that. But I really was involved and did get a chance to take buses — because it was a group there from Ann Arbor — to Washington D.C. and be in really big marches for that. I don’t really remember if I was in one of the Martin Luther King special marches, but it was very eye-opening. And the graduation of the spring, before I finished my senior year — so that was the end of my junior year — was when Johnson came and gave the Great Society speech for graduation at the University of Michigan. And I was there, and I really thought, you know, “Things are going to change.” Well, slowly. But that was very inspirational.

Lentz:

Wow. Seems to be an exciting time to be in college, too.

Kewley-Port:

Yes. [laugh]

Lentz:

Looking back, would you go to the same school?

Kewley-Port:

Oh, yeah.

Lentz:

Major in the same major?

Kewley-Port:

Yep. [laugh]

Lentz:

That’s really kind of exciting.

Kewley-Port:

I added a category about honors, which wasn’t specifically mentioned. Do you want to start a…?

Lentz:

Yeah. OK, so while you were in college, you received a couple of honors as well. Would you like to talk about those?

Kewley-Port:

OK. Well, they were both my senior year, appropriately of course. And probably the one that was totally unexpected was the award that I got as the outstanding woman engineer. It’s called the Marian Sarah Parker Memorial Award. So, there were some women engineers at Michigan, and a family had set up that award. And it was a big deal. I mean, it was where, you know, you’d get to go in the auditorium, and my parents came, and the whole thing.

Lentz:

Oh, wow.

Kewley-Port:

And I was very honored that way. And so that was one of them. And then the second one was that I got a letter that said that I had been nominated to become part of Tau Beta Pi. And Tau Beta Pi is the honors engineering society. And I thought that was really very nice.

Lentz:

Very exciting.

Kewley-Port:

So, I went to their introductory meeting, and they told all the reasons why we had been nominated, and about grade point average, and also things like my job out at the High Altitude Laboratory. You know, other qualities of the individual counted, and so forth. And everything was fine. They talked about there would be an induction ceremony and so forth. And then they explained that I wouldn’t be invited to that, because Tau Beta Pi had a set of bylaws that said that women could not be members. What we could be was — I guess you could call it an associate member. Because what we got was something — I’m gonna cheat here and look and see if I can find [laugh] what it was actually called — it was called the women’s badge. The women’s badge. And so, they were in the process of changing the bylaws so that women could be members, but not yet. So, I wasn’t going to be part of that. But they thought I was a fine person anyway. And we’ll talk more about what happens later on.

Lentz:

Yeah, yeah. Times have changed a little bit since then.

Kewley-Port:

[laugh]

Lentz:

But I can imagine that that would be a little disheartening —

Kewley-Port:

[laugh]

Lentz:

— to be honored, but not really, because of your gender or sex.

Kewley-Port:

[laugh]

Lentz:

So, I think — do you have anything else that you would like to add regarding your college days?

Kewley-Port:

No, because we already talked about going to — the break in between.

Lentz:

OK. You had mentioned during your senior year, you decided to go to get a graduate master’s degree at the University of Michigan. What field was that in?

Kewley-Port:

So, communication sciences was at least a program — it probably wasn’t a department at the time — and that was what I signed up for. And it had a full curriculum. So, it wasn’t like a program where you take one or two classes in that area and then a bunch in other departments. It was its own very full program.

Lentz:

OK. So, would this have been like a master’s in science, or a master’s in arts?

Kewley-Port:

Master’s in science, yes.

Lentz:

So, you kind of applied and were accepted in the fall of your senior year, and then you were in Denmark for a year, traveling around the world. And then you came back to the University of Michigan. So, you’ve kind of talked about some of these already. So, what did you work on while you were getting your master’s degree?

Kewley-Port:

At that point, I didn’t work. It was a very full curriculum, and I was basically jamming it into three semesters, because I had missed the fall semester. I had taken the communication science class undergraduate. And then one of the core parts of the curriculum was various kinds of computer science. Well, I clearly didn’t need that. I had already been [laugh] working in that for a long time. So, I needed to really push hard on the other areas of the curriculum. I thought I might mention two of them, because everything to do with essentially phonetics was very much a part of the communication science curriculum. And so the course that I took, it was called Natural Language. But again, Peterson and Shoup were involved — oh, they tended to team-teach these classes. So, when they had Natural Language, they would have had some linguists, but then Peterson and Shoup who had inspired me in that original introductory course were there. And they wrote — probably one of their most famous papers was “The Elements of an Acoustic Phonetic Theory.” And so they were the first people who really tried to take phonetics, which is the science of sound, and really work with — so we have the different vowel sounds. So, we have the “eee” and “ih” and “ay” and so forth. And then the different types of consonants that we could have. S — “sss” — and “shh” and so forth. And try and put together what at the time — because this paper was published in ‘66 — was the emerging field of acoustic phonetics. And they put it together as a whole theory and combined it with acoustics. And so this was really seminal, again, in my career, because I was excited about languages, especially having been in Denmark and having learned some Danish. And here was a way of applying it to that aspect of linguistics that deals with acoustics, which really appealed to me as a science. So, that was really very relevant. And since you are a psychoacoustician, psychoacoustics was another strong area there. And David Green and John Swets were both still there.

Lentz:

I was going to ask if they were still there.

Kewley-Port:

And that class was in part taught a couple weeks by each of them. And at the time, I thought, “Oh my heavens. I will never in my entire life use this.”

Lentz:

[laugh]

Kewley-Port:

And I wound up calling my lab the Psychoacoustics of Speech Lab. So, there we go. Back to — [laugh]

Lentz:

So, there you go. It all comes back — goes back to the University of Michigan, right?

Kewley-Port:

[laugh] And some really famous people. And the other thing to say is by the time I got the degree — because I left school and got married and some other things which we’ll talk about, so there was a year delay — they had already renamed communication sciences Communication and Computer Sciences and the next year, it became Computer Sciences. So, that was very much an aspect of the curriculum.

Lentz:

It sounds like the curriculum was kind of this combination of psychology and engineering and computer science and physics.

Kewley-Port:

And linguistics.

Lentz:

And linguistics, yeah.

Kewley-Port:

Yeah.

Lentz:

So, is that sort of when you started getting interested in vowels, or will that come later?

Kewley-Port:

I guess that came as I was actually doing my doctoral studies.

Lentz:

So, right now, it was more broad than that.

Kewley-Port:

Yes. It was a place where I was looking forward to going to graduate school, but then there was a hiatus due to my family, which is the next topic.

Lentz:

Right. So, when you were getting your master’s degree, did you have financial support?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. They just gave fellowships. I don’t remember paying a dime.

Lentz:

Nice.

Kewley-Port:

But they don’t do that anymore, do they?

Lentz:

[laugh] No. Times have changed a little bit. So, did you do a master’s thesis?

Kewley-Port:

No.

Lentz:

That’s kind of nice. And you’ve kind of already talked about the people who have had a lot of influence on what you decided to do. Is there anybody else that you might want to add academically?

Kewley-Port:

No, I think I’ve included that.

Lentz:

OK. So, you’ve sort of mentioned a little bit about your family. So, why don’t we talk about that next?

Kewley-Port:

OK. So, the man I have been married to now for 51 years —

Lentz:

Wow.

Kewley-Port:

This week was our anniversary — Robert Port. He and I had become — well, we had met our senior year in high school, and we didn’t start dating for another couple of years. But the last two years of college, when we were home in Cleveland together, we had started dating. We were clearly very committed and close. But he went off to Kenya in the Peace Corps before senior year. He felt that he wasn’t working up to his potential and needed a break, so that’s what he did.

Lentz:

Where was he in college?

Kewley-Port:

He was at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. And so I was finishing up this master’s degree just when he was finishing his Peace Corps. So, I went to Denmark for one year, basically, and got my master’s degree the next year. And he in the meantime was in Kenya with the Peace Corps. And so as you can tell, I’m a little impetuous, so I thought, “Oh, I’m finishing my master’s degree. I think I’ll go to Kenya and see Bob.” [laugh]

Lentz:

Right. Yeah! Seems like a great idea! [laugh]

Kewley-Port:

So, using aerogram method of communication, I got off the plane in Nairobi, and there he was. And we were in Kenya and actually Tanzania for a little bit of the time, for I guess about seven weeks. And it hadn’t been too long before we decided to get married there. Because our parents back in Cleveland, Ohio, were just not real thrilled about us traveling around the world together. So, we did that. And went on to India. And then Bob needed to finish his undergraduate degree — the one that he postponed when he went into the Peace Corps. So, that had us at Johns Hopkins.

Lentz:

And this is before you finished your master’s degree then, or…?

Kewley-Port:

No, I had completed my master’s degree.

Lentz:

OK. So, you had completed it, went and got married in Kenya. Do you want to talk a little bit about the wedding or…?

Kewley-Port:

Oh, well — I mean, we did have our 50th last year. [laugh] We were married by the district of Nairobi district commissioner there, at the home of people that Bob knew from Cleveland. And it’s on the equator. It’s a very beautiful city and was on a ravine. And we had Indian musicians who came. Bob had been studying the sitar. And they came and played music for us. We had African dancers. Now, those we hired. They were not amongst friends that came and blessed our marriage. And it was quite exciting.

Lentz:

Were your parents able to attend?

Kewley-Port:

No, but they hadn’t encouraged us about this whole thing —

Lentz:

[laugh]

Kewley-Port:

They gave us a reception when we got home in the fall.

Lentz:

So, then after you got back from Kenya, what did you guys do?

Kewley-Port:

Well, he had to go to undergraduate school, and I had heard about a research lab in linguistics and phonetics at Johns Hopkins. So, I went and knocked on their door! [laugh] Why write a letter ahead?

Lentz:

[laugh] Seems to work out really well for you to do that. Yeah.

Kewley-Port:

[laugh] And that was called the Neurocommunications Lab, and they did language development. And you know, all my skills from the communication science department were used. All the acoustics and the programming and so forth. So, I did that work for a year, while he was finishing up his senior year. So, that was another work experience, and I’m getting really excited about working in acoustics and language.

Lentz:

So, is this kind of around the time when you decided to go on and get a PhD?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. But Bob had decided that he wanted one, and so he got to go first. But a little bit of that was because I then, during that year, was pregnant with our son. And so I had plans of my own at the time, rather than going to a doctoral program. And he started at Columbia and then went on to the University of Connecticut. So, those years, I worked at Haskins Laboratories, which is also extremely well-known for all of its research in acoustics, acoustic phonetics, and that kind of work. And I had a couple of publications with senior people while I was there. Different work that I did. So, I was raising Nick while Bob was doing his doctoral program. And then from there, we went back to New York City, where I was enrolled for my doctoral degree.

Lentz:

OK, so you started your doctoral degree when you had one child?

Kewley-Port:

Yes, that’s correct.

Lentz:

We’ll just briefly talk about your family at this point, and then if there are things you want to add later, we can always put that back into the history. You’ve talked about Bob. And what does he do now? Or what did he do?

Kewley-Port:

He became interested in linguistics, because while he was in the Peace Corps in Kenya, he had to learn several different languages. He is still totally fluent in Swahili, and he learned Naandi, and oh, I know there were other ones. I can’t even come up with their names. Oh — and Kikuyu. So, when we traveled around, he’d say, “Oh, well, in this next town, what you have to learn is how to say hello, goodbye, and thank you in this language.” I’m like, “Ahh!” So, he went on and became a PhD in linguistics and got his first job here at Indiana University at the linguistics department, and that’s where he retired 11 years ago.

Lentz:

Wow.

Kewley-Port:

Since I became a professor as well, we’ve had careers that have been very close to one another, but coming at things from a different side. So, he comes at his interest in language really from the point of view — it is phonetics, but thinking about the phonetics and cognitive science issues, and how all of those things relate to one another, whereas I’m coming from the engineering and acoustics side. We have lots to talk about, but we come from different angles.

Lentz:

From totally different — right. Different directions. One from the top, one from the bottom, kind of. [laugh]

Kewley-Port:

Exactly.

Lentz:

Yeah. So, do you have more children than Nick?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. When I was in my doctoral program, Nick was in I guess kindergarten at the time, and we thought we’d have one more child, but that turned out to be twins —

Lentz:

An adventure.

Kewley-Port:

— before the end of my doctoral degree. So, that delayed things a little bit. And their names are Juliet Port and Cynthia Port. And I did — it took me five years to finish that doctorate. I don’t know [laugh] —

Lentz:

That’s not too bad. I think nowadays that’s kind of standard, really.

Kewley-Port:

[laugh] Three kids and a husband in pre-tenure.

Lentz:

Was there anything special about them that you’d like to care to mention?

Kewley-Port:

Yeah. So, they were kids, all three of them, that were raised by parents in various stages of earning their PhDs, and then as professors here at Indiana University. So, somehow I have to think they survived all that, because it’s not a very normal upbringing, particularly in those days. But not only did they, but they all have really achieved wonderful careers themselves, and we’re feeling so lucky and proud of these children. And so Nicholas went on and became a neuroscientist, and when he was all done with his NIH postdoc and so forth and had several job offers, he took one here at Indiana University. So, we had the pleasure —

Lentz:

Isn’t that great?

Kewley-Port:

— of having the mother, father, and the son all at the same university. And that is pretty exciting.

Lentz:

Yeah, very.

Kewley-Port:

Very. And very unusual for a high-quality research institution. So, that’s something to be very proud of. And then one of the twins is also here in Bloomington. She is a master’s of social work and is a licensed clinical social worker. Works here at something that’s called Centerstone for behavioral health issues. Works very hard. And the other daughter, Juliet, lives up in Indianapolis, and she’s a licensed geologist and was a state geologist for four years and has gone back into the private sector. But to have three professional kids and to have them all nearby — two here in Bloomington, one in Indianapolis — this is very special.

Lentz:

Very much. Yeah. Do you have grandchildren?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. Nicholas is married to Cynthia Lindman Port and they have two children, our granddaughters.

Lentz:

Nice. Nice. Do you get to see them a lot since you’re all in Bloomington?

Kewley-Port:

As often as possible.

Lentz:

[laugh] That’s great. That sounds like a pretty accomplished family, so I think you have a lot to be proud of there. So, I think when we meet next, we’ll talk about kind of how you got into your PhD program.

[Session 2 ends – Beginning of Session 3]

Lentz:

OK, so we’re going to start talking about graduate school. So, after your master’s degree, did you continue on for a doctorate?

Kewley-Port:

I sure did. And I chose the graduate school of the City University of New York. There’s a lot of universities in that system, things like Brooklyn College and so forth. And this is where the graduate work is [unintelligible].

Lentz:

Why did you decide to go there?

Kewley-Port:

Well, I need to say a little bit about my husband, Robert Port, and myself. Because we had our family early — we were just 24 or 25 — but we hadn’t finished our degrees. So, what we did basically is, you know, one would be having a job, and the other one would be in school until we got done with all our degrees. So, it was kind of my turn. Bob was just finishing up his PhD at the University of Connecticut, and I was working at Haskins Laboratories. I had this engineering and then the computer communication science degrees, so I was very, very technically oriented. And yet I really loved the speech and the speech science. So, I was looking for a school where it was a good combination. And it turned out that the City University of New York — the graduate school, I’ll call it — attracted a lot of engineers from Bell Laboratories, to come and do advanced degrees, mostly their doctorates, because it was very close by to get into Manhattan. And so they were used to having people who were not coming out of a clinical speech and hearing degree, but actually were engineers. And so I could see that was a good match. Furthermore, a number of the faculty at the graduate center were actually scientists at Haskins, so I already knew them. So, I felt like this was a really good match. And Bob could finish up writing his dissertation and start teaching in one of the many City University of New York systems, and he went to Brooklyn College.

Lentz:

So, when you were at Haskins, were you working on anything related to speech at the time, or were you just kind of still interested in it and wanted to pursue that for your doctorate?

Kewley-Port:

I was working on speech research. I was really hired as a programmer. But with — I’m just — yeah, when I walked in the door — another case where I just walked in the door, didn’t know anything [laugh] about it and said, “Here I am.” They needed a program for the speech production studies that were using electromyography — EMG — as the instrumentation for sampling the neural signals that control all of the speech musculature. So, they did have an ENT that was Japanese that was on site, who could place the electrodes, and they needed to do the signal processing for that. And so they thought maybe I had a good background, which in fact was true. So, this got me into speech production. So, I was very interested in that. But this really got me into the research, to be part of that team, because I couldn’t really process those signals unless I knew, of course, what their goals were, and therefore you had to know about the — you know, the objectives of the study. So, I got to see the whole research process there. I got very excited about speech research and also how you could integrate the kind of technical aspects of it that I was trained to do with now the more theoretical [unintelligible].

Lentz:

So, you kind of knew when you went to graduate school, then, that you were interested in speech in general. Or did you know at that time that you wanted to do speech perception?

Kewley-Port:

Well, so that had me basically coming out of the speech production lab EMG research. However, as I mentioned, we were in Connecticut, where Bob was doing his PhD at the University of Connecticut. And I was doing ridesharing with a man named Michael Turvey, who was in visual perception, and also was a cognitive scientist, in general. And so he was interested in masking issues for visual stimuli. And so of course we would chat in the car, and he was getting to the point where he had a lot of data, and he said, “It just doesn’t make sense to me.” I said, “Well, I can make a model for that.” Because I had all this modeling work that was in my communication science program. They were basically neural networks. They weren’t called that then, but that’s what it was. And so we started working together. And again, I had to learn a lot about perception, a lot about masking, things that I got into later in my speech perception. And I mean, he was just jumping up and down to have a model of all this work he had probably been doing probably for five or more years, now being put into a model. He’d say, “Oh, but that doesn’t work because here’s this new data.” And I’d say, “Oh, no, that’s not a problem. We just have to put a connection from here to here. We need a recurrent network.” And so forth. So, I was getting into perception but not speech perception originally. So, I went to the City University of New York where Kathy Harris was, and she was my supervisor on the EMG project. And I wasn’t really sure. In fact, I started working with the thought in mind that I would pursue that speech production electromyography work myself.

Lentz:

I see. I see.

Kewley-Port:

But I was in the meantime being introduced to the speech perception as well.

Lentz:

So, while you were there, how were you supported?

Kewley-Port:

I don’t really know. I think if you went to the graduate center, they had money. They had NIH grants. All this research was going on. It was a very powerful faculty.

Lentz:

Were there any specific projects that you worked on?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. So, the EMG project I was just mentioning — and I continued to work part-time, because they needed my programming skills. I’d drive up with Kathy Harris from Brooklyn, New York, up to Haskins, and we could talk about all kinds of things. And that was my anticipated first dissertation experiment, which was later done by somebody else, basically. Because it was a great idea, but I moved to IU eventually. And so I had — my inspiration from Kathy was really amazing, because there were almost no women at Acoustical Society, almost no women in that kind of technical work. She actually has a Harvard degree, so she was very prominent in terms of being a role model for women. And she did get the Gold Medal of the Acoustical Society. And so I was very inspired by her work. And then I’ve already mentioned this visual perception study that I worked on.

Lentz:

So, then what did you do your doctorate thesis on?

Kewley-Port:

So, again, back to my husband’s career, he did finish his dissertation [laugh] and he came to Indiana University as an assistant professor. And so I was trying to work through a dissertation topic, and David Pisoni — Professor Pisoni — over in the psychology department — I already knew from his connections at Haskins Laboratories in speech perception. He needed a programmer, and so he invited me right away to start working on his grants that were asking various questions primarily with stop consonant perception and with speech synthesis. And so I did a lot of programming for him. And since I had to give up this electromyography project that I had in mind for a dissertation, we had an agreement that if I could be working and help him with his programming, that then when the time came to work on my dissertation and if I picked one that was related to his research on speech perception, that he would support me for that. And that’s what we did. And I should say that in the meantime, twins had been born. So, [laugh] instead of being on the fast track of two years for my dissertation, it wound up being five, of which the first year or so were very, very part-time work programming, and then gradually moved on.

Lentz:

I see. So, you got your theoretical background and your coursework was done in New York —

Kewley-Port:

In New York.

Lentz:

— and then you did your data collection here at Indiana University?

Kewley-Port:

Yes, but in the meantime, I started taking classes in cognitive science and working into that area much more. So, I’ve been in and out of issues that are related to, well, perception and cognitive science for a long time.

Lentz:

You’ve mentioned a few people, but I’ll ask anyway. Who at that school had the greatest influence on your future?

Kewley-Port:

Probably Kathy Harris. But David Pisoni certainly influenced me a lot. He was a very dedicated person in terms of getting grants and showed me what you needed to do, to do that. He was of course on my dissertation committee, but in psychology, not speech and hearing. But the other person I’d like to mention is Harry Levitt, an extremely well-known psychophysicist in hearing research. And he was a professor at the City University of New York. I just did coursework and maybe some studies with him, but I learned my psychophysics mostly from him. And I mentioned David Green before [unintelligible] Michigan, and because he’s very active in the Acoustical Society, he was somebody that I admired a lot. I could go and ask him questions about things when I got into psychophysics of speech. So, I would say those three.

Lentz:

Sounds like you had a lot of really good role models.

Kewley-Port:

[laugh] I sure did. Excellent.

Lentz:

So, just as an aside, while you were going to graduate school, were you attending ASA meetings pretty regularly and getting involved with ASA then, while you were a student?

Kewley-Port:

Yes, but I have all of that as part of the next topic, if you want to stop this one. [laugh]

Lentz:

OK. Then we can stop this one. [laugh] All right. So, let’s move on to your professional career.

Kewley-Port:

OK.

Lentz:

Go ahead. [laugh]

Kewley-Port:

Oh. [laugh] OK. So, it does ask my first place of employment, and what came to mind was the job that I had after my master’s degree had been completed, but actually quite a bit before I had even imagined getting a doctoral degree. So, my husband was going to Johns Hopkins University after the Peace Corps, and so I went there and I investigated some possibilities for employment. And there was a research lab at Johns Hopkins Hospital called the Neurocommunications Laboratory. And I knocked on their door [laugh] in 1967 and explained who I was, and they said, “Oh, really?” Because they could use some help with programming.

Lentz:

Everyone seems to need help programming! [laugh]

Kewley-Port:

[laugh] In the ‘60s, this was not a common — but more in particular, they needed a research associate or scientist, and that’s what I was. And they had already had funding from NIH to set up a laboratory to study the earliest aspects of language development. So, they had techniques for recording children as young as I guess three months and things like that. This was an absolute first in terms of language development research. And so I came in about the second or third year to help with ongoing projects.

Lentz:

Cool. So, while you were there, are there any kind of special accomplishments or projects that you’d like to talk about?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. There are two, really. Because as I said, I worked on multiple projects, but two of them wound up in actual publications in peer-reviewed journals. And the first one was called “The Development of Auditory Feedback Monitoring.” And this was with children up from between six months and 19 months. And so what they were trying to do was to think about the problem of deaf children — and what it is about listening to their own speech, if they’re not deaf — so these were normal hearing children as far as they knew, and I think they all were — that are hearing the feedback of their speech. And so that was one in where I did more of the programming to align the speech and so forth. But I wound up as the second author of a Journal of Speech, Hearing, and Language Research — so that was a peer-reviewed article, but it got me excited. But the main project that I was working on was recording babies starting at six months of age, or maybe four — mostly at six to about two years — in their early productions of stop consonants. And so this was to try and see where stop consonants come in. Everybody thinks that one-year-olds say da-da-da-da-da, which is true around the world, but how do these start? What sort of consonants are they saying before? And so I was looking into that. And I actually became the first author of that paper of the Journal of Phonetics. Wasn’t published until 1974, but nonetheless, again, it got me very involved in all stages of research. So, I would have to say both of those were very influential.

Lentz:

So, was that your first sort of foray into looking at stop consonants?

Kewley-Port:

It was. And that inspired my dissertation research, no question.

Lentz:

How long were you there?

Kewley-Port:

I was only there a year, but because of the Acoustical Society and continued attendance there, I started actually going to both the fall and the spring meeting with [unintelligible] communications. These were people I could stay in touch with. So, there was another person there, Grace Yeni-Komshian, who certainly was very close to the Acoustical Society in her career. And she’s another woman who really inspired me. She comes from Lebanon originally. And in spite of, again, very, very few women being top research scientists, here’s one who came from a country that was Muslim and Christian — but you know, overseas Arab-looking woman became highly successful. So, again, she really was inspiring that you can take on a lot and do well as a woman.

Lentz:

Cool. Was there anyone other than her that influenced you while you were there?

Kewley-Port:

No.

Lentz:

Why did you leave there?

Kewley-Port:

Again, following my husband. It was his turn to be going to school. He was going to New York. And so that was — I already talked about being involved with Haskins Laboratories and eventually the graduate school. But when I got to New York — didn’t I already say this? — I knocked on Haskins Laboratories’ door and got — yes, I did. We talked about the EMG project and all of that. So, that was ‘69 to ‘75. I think I was called a research scientist. And I’ve already mentioned about the publications and so forth. It was all interwoven, the experience really, with the continuing to do work at Haskins Labs and my graduate studies for my doctoral program.

Lentz:

After that, where did you go?

Kewley-Port:

Now, my husband got a job here at Indiana University. And so I was able to from 1976 to ‘83 to here at IU work at Dr. Pisoni’s lab. And I mention that because that became my dissertation for my doctoral work.

Lentz:

After you finished working in David Pisoni’s lab, what did you go on to do next?

Kewley-Port:

Well, I hadn’t been teaching in any of my positions, and computer science was now a department, a very new department, at Indiana University. And I hate to say they were desperate for professors [laugh] but they were. And since I had a master’s in computer science, I had been — I knew some people over there, and so by mutual agreement, they thought I could teach in that department. And what I wasn’t expecting is that they would ask me to teach an introductory course on punch cards, which were no longer being used at most universities, and my class size would be 225, and I would have six AIs because it was a programming class. So, for my very first assignment, I had to somehow design all these projects for the students, figure out how to distribute the work among six different AIs for a class of 225 people. But I did teach there pretty much from ‘83 to ‘87. I taught different classes for computer science. And it was part time. I was basically an adjunct lecturer.

So that was fine. It kept me busy. But I was able to continue research in speech and hearing. Because in 1984, Charles Watson — he’s always known as Chuck — came to speech and hearing. And he was very interested — well, he’s a psychoacoustician. He had done mostly non-speech, but he knew me from Acoustical Society and was very interested in applying some of the types of methods that he had used in psychophysics to speech problems. So, I was hired in his laboratory to do that kind of research, combining speech and psychophysics. So, then I started working with him. So, I was doing research in speech and hearing, teaching in computer science. And eventually — so a job opened up for a speech scientist here in the department, and I interviewed in the regular way the you would interview. But I did get the job. And so that started my tenure track line in 1987. And that was where I spent the rest of my career. I became a full professor and then emeritus in 2009. And it was pretty much a standard teaching and research appointment that you would have in our department.

Lentz:

Great. So, during your career at IU, were there any kind of notable experiences that you had?

Kewley-Port:

Well, what comes to mind is a sabbatical. It was my first sabbatical that I was able to take at ATR Laboratories in Japan. And its address was Takanohara, but it was halfway between Kyoto and Osaka. And started in June 1995, lasted for five months. And this was a very exciting time. Bob got to go with me, but I was the one that was invited there. It was very nice. And it was a very engineering-oriented laboratory, so for a change, I had lots of engineers as my colleagues, whereas at IU there were very few at all, on all of the faculty in Bloomington, because it’s not — it had no engineering school. And so I was able to get back into doing a lot of technical development of my skills and to do very interesting research projects on the interference between first and second languages. That was with Reiko Imada and it was research that I continued later on in several other areas. That was of course interference between Japanese and English, but later on, I did that work with Danish and English — with my languages — Swedish and English, and so forth. So, it set off a new area of my interest, namely the interference between first and second languages.

Lentz:

Interesting. Cool.

[End session 3 – Begin session 4]

Lentz:

All right. I am back with Diane Kewley-Port and we are going to talk about her publications. So, would you like to talk about some of your important published works?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. I’m delighted to do that, in fact. And, the thing that I feel, of course, is the most important are my peer-reviewed research articles. And, that actually allows me to mention about my dissertation, because my dissertation was awarded the Edward Sapir Award for the best dissertation in linguistics in 1981, from the New York Academy of Sciences. And, that made me very proud to have written that type of document, and encouraged me to then publish articles. So, I published three different articles in JASA. And, the topic of my dissertation and the articles in general is Initial Stop Consonants, and both the acoustics that are associated with identifying them acoustically, and then Perception of Stop Consonants. Of course, that’s like differentiating B from P and D from T, which are some of the hardest ones both, you know, in terms of hearing people, as well as machine. And so, I, those three articles in JASA are the most cited articles of my research. So, I thought I’d mention that. To summarize otherwise, actually there were fifty-four articles in major peer-reviewed journals and thirty other publications such as chapters and the like.

Just a way of thinking about the different categories of research, after I left New York and came to IU, I did work with David Pisoni, who was one of my advisors on my dissertation research, for four or five years and continued the stop-consonant research. But my degree, as you understand, is in speech and hearing. And, Charles Watson, who’s known as “Chuck” Watson, came here to Speech and Hearing at IU and he’d heard about some of my research, and invited me to consider coming over to his lab to do speech perception, and in particular to look at the more fine-grained analysis of speech perception through sort of psychophysical methods. So, I decided to do that. And, because we needed sort of more steady-state stimuli I moved over to vowels, because you can say E for a long time, but when you’re saying B, and T, the “buh” and the “tuh” are pretty short. So, I started working on the psychophysical details, and my seminal article there was with Chuck Watson in 1994. So, that’s how that work got going and, basically, I continued to do vowels in research, including with perception by the elderly and perception by people with hearing impairment. And, the majority of those articles are in the Acoustical, in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Lentz:

Cool.

Kewley-Port:

Do I have time to mention some of my applied research?

Lentz:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Kewley-Port:

It won’t take too long.

Lentz:

I’d like to hear about it.

Kewley-Port:

So, Chuck Watson came from Boys Town and other applied labs and he had already thought about the idea of putting some training for people with hearing impairment, whether it was for speech or for improving hearing, on computers. And since I was a computer scientist, he approached me with the idea of writing some grants on that type of topic. So, we wrote a grant for a computer-based speech training aid, primarily aimed at children with hearing impairment. It’s called the ISTRA System. And, we got NIH funding to both develop and establish the effectiveness of that ISTRA System. Most of the research presented for that was at Acoustical Society meetings, but when we began to publish that research it went into clinical and applied journals. Eventually, we started off, started a small business that was a spin-off from IU. It’s called Communication Disorders Technology, and that started in 1981. And, I was awarded numerous SBIR, which stands for Small Business Innovative Research, grants for supporting that research and the publications thereof. The CDT, the business, has continued to work on speech and hearing applications. But, in fact, I haven’t been very closely associated with it for a few years.

Lentz:

Okay. That’s interesting stuff. So, would you also like to talk about the book that you wrote?

Kewley-Port:

Ah. Well, that’s easy, because there’s one of them. (Laughter) Chapters, yes, but only one book. But, it’s kind of an interesting example, because it’s a digital book, now usually called “e-books,” and I started working on that, essentially, about 1998, and I had two colleagues. David Eddins was here in hearing science. Paul Kehle was in mathematics. And, myself. And, what we were interested in doing was to develop and interactive book that would have a lot of examples of the kinds of math and physics that are needed to be a basis or baseline for all the research in speech and hearing. And, again, because I’m a computer scientist I wanted to incorporate the activities of the laboratories as, and use Excel spreadsheets, which were pretty flexible even then and I could put a lot of C++ code into the spreadsheets for these laboratories.

So, we developed this. We got NSF funding for the project and eventually, you know, we were done. We held some workshops to introduce this to our colleagues, since teaching acoustics is done in all speech and hearing undergraduate programs. And, we called it “courseware” and then we started approaching publishers about getting this interactive courseware. And, it had, you know, it had sound files in it and it had, that you could play in class and it could be used easily with, with the developing things like PowerPoint and other slide presentation materials. And, they just had no idea what to do with this. Indiana University felt that since it was digital, involved computers, that maybe this, this should be, you know, patented. And, we just had a terrible time getting this published. So, eventually when it was published, they put it on a digital CD. That was okay. And, they put it in a giant plastic box that looked like a book on the shelf. And, they absolutely would not consider putting it online or downloading it. So, I feel that I was a very early publisher of electronic books and materials, and it was quite an interesting experience, and maybe did pave the way for others for all I know. The last e-books, that I’m aware of, that were sold, were around 2016. So, from 2002 to 2016 I did have some impact. Yeah.

Lentz:

Yeah. So, that was probably pretty innovative for the time, to have an interactive text book?

Kewley-Port:

Well, apparently. We certainly approached many publishers, (Laugh) and they had no clue. And, of course, undergraduates today get probably half their texts from e-books.

Lentz:

They have, you know, tablets and everything that they use. It’s a very cool book. (Laugh) Yeah. So, during your time at IU, I know that you had your research funded in a variety of ways. So, could you talk a little bit more about that and your successes there?

Kewley-Port:

Okay. Well, the kind of research that I was doing involved human subjects, and that included for the speech research usually adults. But, for that speech training-aid research that I mentioned, that was children, it involved clinicians and non-clinician. So, this kind of research really needs to be funded by outside grants. And so, all together I had twenty-seven external grants and that includes multi-year grants from NIH that were R01 grants, the sort of highest level of grant, five to seven years, where I was actually the principal investigator. I was also part of faculty groups that wrote training grants, where we could underwrite the funding for doctoral students and master students. And, there were seven major training grants that I was involved in, and those were also from NIH, but NSF as well.

Lentz:

So, were most of your PhD students then funded through one of your grants or a training grant?

Kewley-Port:

Yes. I had partnerships, as I’ve mentioned before, with Charles Watson, and he had grants. And so, we often had joint students. And then, Larry Humes, who came a few years after I started here, is a distinguished professor and he and I have a lot of shared students. So, between my grants and Watson’s and Humes’s grants, all of my students were funded.

Lentz:

That’s very nice. Yeah. That’s a nice way to support future PhDs in the field. So, you also received some honors that I’d like to hear about.

Kewley-Port:

Oh. Okay. Well, I would like to mention one of my first honors, because it was for that applied speech training-aid research, and that’s kind of the only honor I’ve had for that applied side. And, ASHA, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, was opening, in their headquarters, a wing that they were calling their “science wing,” and they invited what they considered some notable scientists to come and make presentations at the dedication of that. And so, I was invited as one of just three scientists, as I remember, and they called it the Future of Science and Services seminar, and that was in October 1990. And so, I just felt that that part of my research effort was nicely honored with that dedication. In a more formal sense, the Acoustical Society of America has honored me in several ways. In 1993 I became a Fellow of the Acoustical Society, and that was for my work both in speech perception and the applied speech technology. So, it was acknowledged that I really do have these two sides to my research. This wasn’t quite as formal, and, but it was very meaningful to me. So, the Acoustical Society, as we all know, has special sessions and there was – my students and former colleagues put together a special session on speech communication of vowels, in honor of me, Diane Kewley-Port, and that was in 2014. And this is done quite often across all the technical committees in the Society, but I felt especially honored to hear my colleagues talk about their research and how we have interacted with one another. And, at that same meeting then, the Women in Acoustics nominated me as the distinguished woman in the Society. And so, that was another Acoustical Society honor.

Lentz:

Very cool. And, also shortly after that were you formally inducted into Tau Beta Pi?

Kewley-Port:

Oh, yes. Picking up that story. (Laughter) Yes. So, so going back to, I think it was 1964, I was given a women’s badge and they, the Tau Beta Pi did change their constitution to allow women to be full members, maybe about four years later. But, by then I had moved on and was living in New York and not anywhere near Michigan, and they sent a couple of letters and then, I guess, I fell off their, their list of being able to track me around while I was doing the masters and doctoral work, and so forth. And, so I didn’t hear about, hear from them for a long time. And then, they decided to open a chapter at IUPUI, which is Indiana University-Perdue University in Indianapolis, because they have a big engineering school, and they wanted to start a chapter. And, people up in Indianapolis knew that I had never become a full member. So, they invited me to investigate whether I could become a full member when they got their charter, which would be for their new chapter. And, we kind of worked together on that a little bit, and that actually excited me because all this applied work, and the computer science side of it, and the computer engineering side had been a real big part of my career. Now, this was fifty-two years later. (Laughter) So, . . .

Lentz:

It’s never too late. (Laugh)

Kewley-Port:

It’s never too late. And so, what is the date? Sorry.

Lentz:

Uh, 2015.

Kewley-Port:

Oh.

Lentz:

Is the date that I have.

Kewley-Port:

Yeah, 2015? So, maybe it was fifty-one years later. But, in any case, I became a full member and I proudly wear my Tau Beta Pi pin anytime that there’s an appropriate occasion.

Lentz:

That’s exciting. (Laugh) Yeah. Okay. So, during this time you’ve been pretty active in the Acoustical Society. So, would you like to tell me about some of your major roles and contributions?

Kewley-Port:

Okay. Well, I looked forward, after my research career was well underway, to doing service for the Society, and I had the first opportunity when I was asked to be the chair of the Speech Technical Committee. That was in 2002, and that’s basically a three-year appointment. And, that, I liked doing that and I liked meeting with the, it’s the Technical Council, which has the chairs of all the technical committees. It’s run by the vice president. And so, I got to know people in the other committees and I began to see the Society in a much broader scope. And so, when I was asked if I would be a candidate for being a member of the Executive Council. This was just as I was winding down as TC chair. I thought that was really a good idea, that I was ready to do that because I was more familiar with the Society. And so, I actually stopped being the Technical Committee chair about one minute before I was a member of the Executive Council. (Laugh) So, I devoted three years to that position and found it very rewarding, found that I could contribute in various ways. They have a lot of assignments for the, these are the general members of the Executive Council. And, I know one of the things I did was be on the Audit Committee. I knew absolutely nothing about auditing. I learned quick. I got a little guide and was a member of that for all three years, etcetera. So, I was asked if I would be a candidate for the vice presidency, as I was ending my term on the Executive Council, and I was nominated to be vice president. So, immediately after (Laugh) being Executive Council . . .

Lentz:

And, you were elected? (Laugh)

Kewley-Port:

And one minute later I was the vice president. So, that was a total of nine years of service.

Lentz:

Wow. Yeah.

Kewley-Port:

So, I said it was rewarding. I don’t want to do the whole thing again. I just want to say that for the nine years.

Lentz:

Uhm-hmm. Uhm-hmm.

Kewley-Port:

Is that all right?

Lentz:

Yes. Yes. So, what do you feel like some of your major accomplishments were while you were serving the ASA?

Kewley-Port:

Well it sort of went back and forth between the science side, which was for being the chair of the Speech Technical Committee that was local to my committee, and the administrative side, which is when I was on the Executive Council. And then, when I was vice president, it kind of combined them, but the vice president is the chair of the Technical Council. And so, that allowed me then to be thinking, you know, very broadly and in detail what the needs of the science of the Society are. So, I feel like I, I got very involved in both sides. And, what happens to vice presidents and others who are officers is that you get involved in particular projects. And, what I saw as a major issue to undertake, when I was vice president, was to improve our online presence. And, this was both of the Society’s homepage, that would give us information directly from the Internet about the Society, and for our publications, which while I was vice president we’re still, had still not moved to an online platform. So, I took, as a personal effort really, to improve our online presence. And so, I was instrumental and helpful with getting a web developer, which we now have. So, we have a website that is modern and is hopefully informative for the members of the society. And then, more recently I have been working as a consultant for publications for issues that arise with the online publications. And, one of the things that’s going to happen, and hopefully has happened, is we are now going to have new covers, for example, for the journal, which will reflect every month a significant article that was published in the journal. And this, of course, has been done by science societies for fifteen years, in other societies, (Laugh) but it’ll be new to us in July.

Lentz:

Cool. Cool.

Kewley-Port:

And, the other thing that I did was to help develop a new logo for the society. Our logo for eighty-eight years was designed when the society was established in 1929, and now we have a new logo. And, that was a project that I was involved in.

Lentz:

That’s great. Yeah. So, I think we’re getting close to wrapping up. There’s one last section on personal interests. So, would you like to talk about any of those?

Kewley-Port:

Okay. The first question is about?

Lentz:

Oh. What is your favorite form of entertainment?

Kewley-Port:

Entertainment? (Laugh) Basically, I guess it’s music. Our household is filled with music all the time. My husband, Bob Port, is a more-than-an-amateur musician. He comes from a line of professional musicians in his family. And, we both sing in the choir. And, I’ve been singing in the choir for twenty-five years, and that’s very, very, and rewarding personally.

Lentz:

Nice. Nice. Yeah. It ties in with acoustics very well, as well. (Laugh)

Kewley-Port:

Oh, yes. I do apply it, apply it a lot, actually.

Lentz:

Yeah. Okay. So, what is your favorite book or author?

Kewley-Port:

Well, the kind of books that I like to read are basically biographies or autobiographies. And so, I can mention two of the people that I admire most. One is inside our field, Marie Curie, you know, an early woman in physics, of course. And, the other is Julia Childs. One of my hobbies, I guess you’d have to say, is cooking. And, you know, she was the first female chef that had a TV show, and just an amazing woman. So.

Lentz:

Uhm-hmm. Do you have any favorite movies or movie stars?

Kewley-Port:

I think that would be Meryl Streep. I like the many ways she can play roles.

Lentz:

Yeah. Well, how about music and singers?

Kewley-Port:

Ah hah. Raised during the folk-song era, in high school and college. So, that’s a prominent part. I mean, we have diversity of music in our house, but I can mention Bob Dylan and Joan Baez as two of my favorites.

Lentz:

Uhm-hmm. Nice. Do you watch TV?

Kewley-Port:

Unfortunately, it would be news. (Laugh) And, that’s not something (Laugh) I want to pursue. (Laugh)

Lentz:

Yeah. Do you like sports?

Kewley-Port:

I did a lot of athletics as a young person myself, but I, I don’t pursue anything particularly. But soccer has been a great favorite, because our son was very involved in soccer. He’s extremely athletic. I may have mentioned this before. And so, at a time when soccer was not well known in the United States, when he was growing up, he’s going to be fifty this year, I was one of the soccer moms and loved soccer. Youth soccer has been very good. And then, in the last thirty years he’s moved from soccer to trapeze, where he’s a catcher on the trapeze with a local club here. And, I wouldn’t want to say that’s a sport you follow, but it’s pretty interesting.

Lentz:

Well, I can only imagine. (Laugh) Yeah. Are you watching the World Cup right now?

Kewley-Port:

I’ve been paying attention to it, and will be watching the finals.

Lentz:

Yeah.

Kewley-Port:

Yeah.

Lentz:

Me, too. And, last but not least, how about art? Do you have a favorite artist?

Kewley-Port:

Well, I’ll just mention Monet. We’re fortunate enough to be going to France in the fall, and Monet is a favorite and I think his paintings of nature, which give so much peace and serenity and beauty, make him one of my favorites.

Lentz:

Very nice.

Kewley-Port:

Yeah.

Lentz:

Well, thank you. So, is there anything else that you would like to add before we end the interview?

Kewley-Port:

Well, I have found my science career to just be so exciting and I’ve really enjoyed every aspect of it, from the actual discoveries made to having people think that they’re important, through the citations of my articles, the students that I’ve been close to and have seen succeed, and I see them at the society meetings and they have very good jobs, having gotten tenure at major universities. This has been a wonderful experience and I hope I will be able to continue those friendships with my colleagues and my former students at Acoustical. So, that’s a, I tend to still go to meetings for the science and the contacts with my professional colleagues. And, the other thing is, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve been doing service for the society with publications. That’s probably going to continue. So, certainly for the next few years I expect to continue my service with the society.

Lentz:

Great. Well, I’m sure the society benefits from that greatly. So, thank you for your time.

Kewley-Port:

Well, thank you very much for your leading all of the interview so (

Lentz:

Yeah.) ably. I really appreciate it.

Lentz:

Yeah. And, I’m confirming that this is the end of our interview.

[END INTERVIEW]