Photo credit: Ronda L. Sewald—click for print-quality version

Patrick Feaster

is a researcher and educator specializing in the history and culture of early sound media.  A two-time Grammy nominee and co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative, he has been actively involved in locating, making audible, and contextualizing many of the world's oldest sound recordings. He received his doctorate in Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 2007 from Indiana University Bloomington, where he is currently an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Communication and Culture and a member of the Media Preservation Initiative.

Latest: Slate ran a piece called "Listening to Records That No Longer Exist" about my playback last year of a paper print of a gramophone disc recorded in 1889 and published in 1890. A blog post I'd written on the same subject also got some new attention on Reddit, briefly reaching the number six position on their front page. Recent broadcast coverage of archeophonic projects includes a German-language report on Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen and Deutschlandradio Kultur, as well as an interview I did with Patt Morrison for Southern California Public Radio. I was also the "Indiana University sound historian" mentioned on NBC Nightly News for my part in discovering a recording of the voice of Alexander Graham Bell, although credit for the playback of the recording—which is the really newsworthy part of the story—belongs to Carlene Stephens of NMAH, Carl Haber and Earl Cornell of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Peter Alyea of the Library of Congress. The same development has been covered in the New York Times and in various media abroad; here's Chinese.