Mustazza named PennSound associate director

PennSound is pleased to welcome Chris Mustazza as our new Associate Director. Chris has served as our technical director since the founding of the PennSound project in 2005. He brings to our work extraordinary technical expertise in digital sound analysis and audio preservation. His appointment marks the inauguration of PennSound 2.0. Over the past decade PennSound has worked to digitize and make accessible many thousands of sound files by hundreds of poets. With PennSound 2.0, we are enabling computational analysis of our vast sound archive, allowing for both “distant listening” — the analysis of our aggregated files — as well as “close listening” to individual files, including specific features of the initial recordings conditions. Chris will also ensure that the PennSound keeps up with best archival practices, including upgrades and interfaces.

Mustazza joins co-founders and co-directors Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis, Editor Michael Hennessey, and Technical Director Chris Martin.

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Chris Mustazza is a doctoral student in English Literature and an IT director at the University of Pennsylvania. He has edited several collections of previously unreleased poetry recordings, including readings by Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and James Weldon Johnson, and his writing has appeared in Oral Tradition, the Chicago Review, the Notre Dame Review, and Jacket2. For the 2015-16 academic year, he’s been awarded a creative grant by Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room to work on his dissertation, which focuses on the birth of the poetry audio archive in America.