Christian was our friend, a much loved friend with whom we shared everything: our hopes, projects, discussions, experiences, discoveries . . . He loved life, he loved humanity, and he loved being surrounded by people and communicating with them. More than ten years after he abruptly passed away, dancing and singing, we dedicate this book to him as a way to keep him and his spirit alive within our scientific community.

Christian specifically liked to read three kinds of publication. First was the French newspaper Libération, which was founded during Christian’s adolescence when he discovered political commitment. Christian never forgot to buy his copy each morning. Second was the Bandes Dessinées, the French version of the north American comics. He owned a marvelous collection of these that amused every visitor to his home. Finally, he loved and published works about speech science. He contributed as an author or as an editor to a number of such works. Although proud of each contribution, for him the most important was certainly the 1992 edition of the proceedings of the First ESCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis, produced in collaboration with Gérard Bailly and Tom Sawallis. He was very excited by this task, and worked hard on it for many months to make sure that it would make an interesting and lasting contribution to the field, which it has. Having a strong sense of humor, Christian also wanted the book to be fun. Coupling this with his constant desire to see as much interaction as possible between apparently disparate people and endeavors, he commissioned a Bandes Dessinées cartoonist to draw a picture for the cover page. The cartoon, reproduced here, shows a grandmother robot sitting on an armchair just beginning to tell two children a story: Il était une fois . . . – “Once upon a time . . .” This wonderfully captures Christian’s concept of research in speech communication: a domain where scientists have fun working hard to increase human understanding and the quality of life.

In close collaboration with Christian Abry and Tahar Lallouache, and with his students Oscar Angola, Tayeb Mohamadi, Thierry Guiard-Marigny, Ali Adjoudani, Bertrand LeGoff, and Lionel Revéret, Christian was a pioneer in the synthesis and recognition of audiovisual speech. His dedication and enthusiasm for the endeavor influenced academic and industrial researchers

throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Australia. He established strong and fruitful international collaborations, principally with Dominic Massaro and Michael Cohen from the University of California in Santa Cruz, where he spent a sabbatical leave in 1993, and with Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson at ATR in Kyoto, which he visited many times. These are but a few of the collaborations that had begun to burgeon. At the time of his death in April, 1998, he was already a key member in a number of French and European projects; indeed, he and his research team were recognized as a most welcome addition to any research project.

Alongside his dedication to having fun with science, Christian was also quite serious about using his prodigious social and communicative talents to foster institutional structures aimed at facilitating the growth and development of speech science as a multi-faceted discipline that, especially within Europe, would break down the barriers imposed by competition and prejudice, be they institutional, national, international, or inter-continental. The vehicle for his dream of a barrier-free venue for the exchange of research ideas was the European Speech Communication Association (ESCA) which sponsors full-scale conferences where academic and industrial researchers convene annually and numerous topical and training workshops. Christian was Secretary of ESCA from 1993, but died before realizing his dream of globalizing the society by getting rid of the reference to Europe in its name. Soon after his death, ESCA was renamed ISCA (the International . . . ).

Among his very creative initiatives, we will briefly mention two that illustrate his interest in stimulating scientific research and education. Along with David Stork and N. Michael Brooke, Christian co-organized a NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) workshop in 1995 entitled, “Speechreading by Man and Machine: Models, Systems and Applications.” This workshop brought together for the first time engineers, primarily from industry, and psychologists, hearing specialists, and others from academia and public health to consider issues of common interest in auditory and visual speech processing (AVSP). Christian’s involvement with the NATO-ASI and his quick-witted decision to follow through with subsequent AVSP workshops (Philadelphia 1996; Rhodes 1997; Terrigal 1998; Santa Cruz 1999; Scheelsminde 2001; St-Jorioz 2003; Vancouver 2005; Hilvarenbeek 2007; Moreton Island 2008; Norwich 2009) gave coherence to this new sub-discipline of speech science. Christian then wisely sought and received recognition and sponsorship for this new area of inquiry from ESCA, by advocating the importance of special interest groups (SIG) for addressing new areas of interest without interrupting the main stream of the professional society. The day he died he had just drafted the details of what would have been the first of these within ESCA/ISCA, now known as AVISA (the Auditory-Visual Speech Association). The year 1998 saw also the creation of SynSIG (the Speech Synthesis Special Interest Group), that together with AVISA cover Christian’s research themes.

The Christian Benoît association was created on April 26, 1999. Founded by personal donations, the ICP and ISCA, its scientific committee biannually awards the “Christian Benoît” prize to a young researcher in order to help him or her develop a multimedia project. The first laureates are Tony Ezzat (from Medialab, MIT, USA, see his contribution in this volume) and Johanna Barry (from Bionic Ear Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia), Olov Engwal (from Department of Speech, Music and Hearing , KTH, Stockholm, Sweden), Susanne Fuchs (from Center of General Linguistics in Berlin, Germany) and Sascha Fagel (from Department for Language and Communication of the Berlin Institute of Technology, Germany).

At the ICP, thanks to Christian’s pioneering efforts, a large number of projects have been developed in auditory and visual speech processing, the branch of spoken communication research that he was so instrumental in establishing. Some of these projects extend and improve upon Christian’s work. Gérard Bailly, Pierre Badin, Frédéric Elisei, and Matthias Odisio extended his pioneer work on lips towards a data-driven talking head that drives not only the visible movements of the entire face but also pilots the underlying speech articulator: the jaw, the tongue and more recently the velum. Virginie Attina, Gérard Bailly, Denis Beautemps, Marie Cathiard, and Guillaume Gibert are developing a system for synthesizing cued-speech, the use of synchronized hand motions to facilitate communication for hearing-impaired people. Christian was passionately involved with cued-speech research during the last weeks of his life.

Christian would probably have liked to be one of the editors of this book. He knew all the contributors personally and he would have enjoyed reading their papers, arguing and joking with them, and simply being part of a communicative process he understood so well.

This book is “absolutely” dedicated to him!