All in Good Time: A Tribute to Ira Hirsh

The scientific career of Ira J. Hirsh has been one of truly epic proportions, with an enduring impact on the field of human communication and its disorders. In the spring of 1992, to acknowledge this long and illustrious history and on the occasion of his 80th year, a special session to honor him was held as part of the 143rd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Pittsburgh, PA. At this session, 10 invited papers were presented, contributed by 12 of Ira's colleagues, many of whom were former students, postdoctoral students, and faculty members at the Central Institute for the Deaf during the years he served as Research Director. The authors and titles of those 10 papers were as follows:

Weisenberger JM. Ira at 80: The acronyms of a career in acoustics.

Watson CS. Events, sequences, and patterns: Hirsh's prescient proposals.

Grant K. It's about time: Presentation in honor of Ira Hirsh.

Divenyi PL. The times of Ira Hirsh.

Formby C, Gagne JP. Ira as a pioneer in audiology: His contributions to the clinical measurement of hearing and hearing impairment.

Geers A. Ira Hirsh and oral deaf education: The role of audition in language development.

Clark W. Personal glimpses of Ira Hirsh: Covariance of perception and reality.

Bilger RC, Speaks CE. Parameter space of the dichotic speech experiment.

Singh PG. Transcending boundaries with Ira Hirsh.

Lauter JL. Ad cerebrum per scientia: Ira Hirsh, psychoacoustics, and new approaches to understanding the human brain.

For this special edition of Seminars in Hearing, we are pleased to present revised versions of eight of these presentations. In our special session at the Acoustical Society meeting, and in these published papers, we celebrate Ira's influence on us as individuals and on the world; in a paraphrase of the first line of Virgil's Aeneid, Arma virumque cano (“Of arms and the man I sing”), we wish to say, Scientia virumque canamus (“Of science and the man we sing”). Ira's own work and his way of doing science continue to enrich and empower our insights into how human beings relate to one another and their environment. Guided by the navigation maps he provided, his scientific heirs around the world will go on exploring new realms of communication and expanding the empire of our understanding regarding the many ways biology supports behavior.