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Chris Mustazza

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Chris Mustazza, Ph.D.

Co-Director of the PennSound Archive

Director of Academic Computing, School of Arts & Sciences

Adjunct Faculty in Penn's English department
Research Fellow, Linguistics Data Consortium

Here is the newest Machine-Aided Close Listening tool, this one demonstrating a comparative approach to studying the relationship between multiple performances of the same poem.



I had the privilege to meet with Digital Humanities scholars from around the world and give a talk on DH methods for studying poetry audio. See more about the conference here.




MITH Digital Dialogue



I was honored to be invited to give a Digital Dialogue at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. See the recording of my talk, "Dialectical Materialities: PennSound, Early Poetry Recordings, and Disc-to-Disk Translations," here.


Machine-Aided Close Listening



Check out the prototypes of these tools for Machine-Aided Close Listening, a reading-listening methodology that seeks to align the visual forms of poems with their sonic forms. Article on this topic forthcoming in Digital Humanities Quarterly. These tools were developed with Reuben Wetherbee and my research assitant Zoe Stoller.

* Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man"
* Robert Frost's "Mending Wall"
* Comparative tool for William Carlos Williams' "To Elsie"

Poetry Audio Lab is back



This fall I will be teaching Poetry Audio Lab: Modern Poetry & Sound Studies again. The course asks the question of what Modern poetry sounds like if approached primarily through audio recordings, rather than through the texts of the poems. See more here.


My new article on Machine-Aided Close Listening is out in Digital Humanities Quarterly. You can read it here. This essay will also be coming out in French in an edited volume on poetry audio archives from Les presses du réel.

WHYY Interview



I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by NewsworksTonight's Dave Heller, for my work editing the earliest recordings of Robert Frost. You can hear the audio of the interview here.

The interview also relates to my work editing The Speech Lab Recordings, perhaps the first attempt to compile an archive of recordings of poets' voices, started at Columbia University in 1931 and recorded on aluminum records.

Awards



I'm beyond honored to have won several awards this year, for the varying dimensions of my work. I have been awarded:

  • A 2019 Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students - nominated by the students of my course, Poetry Audio Lab.

  • A Models of Excellence Model Supervisor award - a University-wide service award, nominated by my team at the School of Arts & Sciences Computing, for my leadership of our group.

  • The Ezra Pound Prize for Literary Translation (Second Place) - for my translations of poetry from Italian and French to English.

    • Clipping @ Jacket2



    Be sure to check out Clipping, a series on experimental digital approaches to studying poetry audio, which I edit for Jacket2 Magazine.

    Radio Free Poetry



    Here's a recording of a Penn Knowledge By the Slice talk featuring my mentor and friend Charles Bernstein and me. We talk about the history of PennSound, our plans for developing it into a computational platform for doing new kinds of research, and then have an interesting Q&A with the audience. The talk was given around the fourteenth anniversary of the PennSound archive, now the world's largest archive of recordings of poets reading their own work.

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