Neville Fletcher

Neville Horner Fletcher, born in Armidale, New South Wales, on 14 July 1930, was an Australian physicist and acoustician whose work focused on how musical instruments sound. He combined research, teaching and the direction of scientific institutions.

He studied at the University of Sydney, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1951, and then at Harvard, where he completed his doctorate in 1956. After a period in industry and at CSIRO, he was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of New England in 1963. In 1983 he directed CSIRO's Institute of Physical Sciences, and in 1988 he was a visiting researcher at the Australian National University. He learnt the flute in Sydney and Boston.

Working with Suzanne Thwaites, he studied the sound of flutes and organ pipes, and the reed and lip generators of wind instruments. He analysed the vibration of gongs and cymbals and, together with the composer Moya Henderson, invented the alemba, a percussion instrument with a keyboard of tuned triangles.

His best-known popular work is The Physics of Musical Instruments (1991), written with T. D. Rossing. In 1998 he received the Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society of America. He had been a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science since 1976.