Professor H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins, who proposed the field of Cognitive Science (Longuet-Higgins, 1973), died at 27 March 2004 at the age of 80.
One of the last great polymaths, he made important scientific advances in two quite different disciplines - chemistry and artificial intelligence - and many people think he was unlucky not to receive a Nobel Prize for his work in the former.
Longuet-Higgins won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1941 and quickly established himself, by publishing a landmark paper on the unusual molecule diborane while still an undergraduate. By the age of 27 he was Professor of Theoretical Physics at King's College London and two years later he became Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at Cambridge. Longuet-Higgins's outstanding contributions to quantum chemistry and statistical mechanics earned him the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1958 and cemented his department's pre-eminent reputation.
In 1968 however, Longuet-Higgins made a dramatic change of direction, giving up his Cambridge position to become a Royal Society Research Professor at Edinburgh University. There he co-founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception, and played a major role in creating the School of Epistemics, which enabled an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the mind. Longuet-Higgins coined the term 'cognitive science' to encompass the work undertaken in Edinburgh in informatics, neural networks and language generation by computer.
Moving to Sussex University in 1974, Longuet-Higgins carried on his artificial intelligence work, making major contributions in vision, language production and music perception. It was perhaps this last that was closest to the heart of this polymath. In addition to chemistry, he had studied music at Oxford and was a pianist, conductor and composer. Following his retirement in 1988 he examined the problem of how to automate the process of performing music from a score. This work was never published, but as his meticulously kept notebooks attest, the research is available for reconstruction. The letters, papers and allied material are archived at the Royal Society.
An example of Longuet-Higgins's writings, introducing the field of music cognition:
'You're browsing, let us imagine, in a music shop, and come across a box of faded pianola rolls. One of them bears an illegible title, and you unroll the first foot or two, to see if you can recognize the work from the pattern of holes in the paper. Are there four beats in the bar, or only three? Does the piece begin on the tonic, or some other note? Eventually you decide that the only way of finding out is to buy the roll, take it home, and play it on the pianola. Within seconds your ears have told you what your eyes were quite unable to make out -- that you are now the proud possessor of a piano arrangement of "Colonel Bogey"' Longuet-Higgins (1979)
References
Longuet-Higgins, H.C. (1973) Comments on the Lighthill report. Artificial Intelligence - A Paper Symposium. London: Science Research Council. (Reprinted in Longuet-Higgins, 1987.)
Longuet-Higgins, H.C. (1976) The perception of melodies. Nature, 263, 646-653. (Reprinted in Longuet-Higgins, 1987.)
Longuet-Higgins, H.C. (1979) The perception of music. Proceedings of the Royal Society, B 205, 307-322. (Reprinted in Longuet-Higgins, 1987.)
Longuet-Higgins, H.C. (1981) A computer algorithm for reconstructing a scene from two projections, Nature, vol. 293, pp. 133-135. (Reprinted in Longuet-Higgins, 1987.)
Longuet-Higgins, H.C. & C.S. Lee (1982) Perception of musical rhythms. Perception. 11, 115-128. (Reprinted in Longuet-Higgins, 1987.)
Longuet-Higgins, H.C. (1987) Mental Processes. Studies in Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
Longuet-Higgins, H.C. (1994) Artificial intelligence and musical cognition. Phil. Trans. Royal Society London A, 329,103-113.
Some related links
- The personal papers and scientific notebooks of Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins arrived at the Royal Society in December 2005
- An obituary by Chris Darwin.
- Clarke, E. (2004) Christopher Longuet-Higgins. Psychology of Music, 32, 449-453.[Obituary]
- An elaborate in memoriam from Edinburgh University (Additional in memoriam).
- Modest website on the early work of Longuet-Higgins.
- On AI at Edinburgh in the sixties.
- Sonata for Violin & Piano by Longuet-Higgins.
- Paper mentioning a robot (Craikian automaton) made by Longuet-Higgins in 1943.
- [to be elaborated]
Personal collaboration
A paper that was planned to be co-authored with H.C. Longuet-Higgins, but never substantialized, is a study on beat induction with the title: The musical shoe, a working model of beat induction (an abstract written by Longuet-Higgins in 1993):*
The problem we address in this paper is how a musical listener can often pick up the beat of a tune when the notes are not played or sung but merely tapped out in strict time. Referring to this task as "beat induction" we note that some people are much better at it than others, so that no model of beat induction could possibly describe the musical responses of all human listeners. Subject to this caveat, and bearing in mind that tunes differ widely in rhythmic perspicuity, we describe a model of the beat induction process based unashamedly on our own musical intuitions. To demonstrate the predictive power of the model we have actually constructed a mechanical device - a Musical Shoe - which, when it has "heard" enough notes of the tune, starts tapping out the main beats. As material on which to test the Shoe we have chosen a musical genre that might be expected to succeed in stirring a listener's rhythmic sense, namely the national anthems of Western countries. The results may be of interest to the comparative musicologist.*Some of this research was presented at a Royal Society meeting in 1994 (Longuet-Higgins, 1994; [last paper?]). But unfortunately we could never finalize this work (see description of the musical shoe and the shoe in Christophers kitchen).
www.hum.uva.nl/mmm