Dr. Chris Mustazza

Biography

Chris Mustazza's work centers on poetry audio archive digital analyses and sound recordings of poets reading their own work. His current book manuscript, tentatively titled 'Speech Labs: Language Experiments, Early Poetry Audio Archives, Poetic Record', details the history of poetry audio archive, focusing on how the voices of poets were collected, valued, and defined during the early period of sound recording. His project includes efforts to digitize and contextualize a collection of poetry recordings in the U.S. and his work has edited early recordings of poets such as Robert Frost, James Weldon Johnson, and Gertrude Stein. Mustazza designs digital tools for analyzing performance poetry, working at the intersection of literary studies and linguistics methodologies. He has discussed the concept of 'Machine-Aided Close Listening' in the Digital Humanities Quarterly, referencing historical computational approaches to prosody. He is interested in tools that provide new opportunities for close listening, including machine-listening and artificial intelligence approaches to audio corpus analysis. As Co-Director of the PennSound archive, alongside Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein, and as Senior Director of Academic Computing at Penn's School of Arts & Sciences, Mustazza is deeply engaged in academic computing and sound studies in the context of literature.

Research Interests

Experience

Awards

Courses