Flanagan was born in Greenwood, Mississippi. He received a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1948 at Mississippi State University. Afterwards, he started as a graduate student in the Acoustics Laboratory at MIT where he got his master's degree in 1950 and, after a two-year break teaching at Mississippi State, received his Ph.D. in 1955.[2]
He was chosen as the 2005 recipient of the Research and Development Council of New Jersey's Science/Technology Medal. He worked at Bell Laboratories for 33 years before he joined Rutgers. He has worked in voice communications, computer techniques, and electroacoustic systems. At Bell Laboratories he was the department head of the Acoustics Research Department for many years, and managed and supported work such as James E. West's invention of the electret microphone, Bishnu S. Atal's work on speech coding, David Berkley and Gary Elko's work on acoustics, Jont Allen and Joe Hall's work on psychoacoustics, James D. Johnston's work on perceptual audio coding mp3, work on speech synthesis, and Lawrence Rabiner and Aaron Rosenberg (and others) work on speech recognition. Flanagan holds the patent on the modern artificial larynx design.[3] During his tenure, first as department head, and then Laboratory Director, many advancements in signal processing, psychoacoustics, array microphone processing, digital loudspeakers, and other pioneering achievements were reduced to practice.
^P. Cummiskey, N. S. Jayant, and J. L. Flanagan, "Adaptive quantization in differential PCM coding of speech," Bell Syst. Tech. J., vol. 52, pp. 1105—1118, Sept. 1973.
