In memoriam: Albert S. Bregman (1936-2023)

Dear CIRMMT members,

It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Albert S. Bregman, CIRMMT’s longest Honorary Lifetime Member, who passed away on Thursday, May 18, 2023, at the age of 87.

Born in Toronto in 1936, Al Bregman studied at the University of Toronto, Yale (PhD 1963) and Harvard, where he researched human memory. In 1965 he joined the Psychology Department at McGill University in Montreal, where he spent his entire career. His work centered on the fields of experimental psychology and cognitive science. He is best known for having developed the field of auditory scene analysis in his 1990 book, Auditory Scene Analysis: the Perceptual Organization of Sound.

Dr. Bregman received a number of accolades and awards in his lifetime, including elections as a Fellow to the Canadian Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association and the Royal Society of Canada. In 1995, he was awarded the Jacques Rousseau Medal for interdisciplinary contributions by the Association francophone pour le savoir. In 2004, he received the CPA Donald O. Hebb Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Science, and in 2012, the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

We would like to conclude by sharing the words of one of Al Bregman’s former student, CIRMMT member and former director Stephen McAdams: “His deep thinking, limitless generosity, creative mind, and unrelenting search for understanding how we hear and listen have had far reaching influence not only on the field of auditory perception and cognition, but in the fields of cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, computational modeling of hearing, music psychology, and even the philosophy of sound more generally. He will be sorely missed, but his thought-provoking legacy will endure.”

You can leave condolences and find more information on the funeral service at this link.