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Welcome to PHONOZOIC, a website dedicated to the history of the phonograph and other early sound media. (Seeing this page with banner ads or intrusive frames? Navigate to www.phonozoic.net to eliminate them.) I'm your host, Patrick Feaster (that's me on the right).  My main research interest is the culture of early phonography—usually called the "recording and reproduction of sound."  I received my Ph.D. in April 2007 from the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Bloomington, and am currently on the academic job market (all inquiries gratefully received). photo: Ronda L. Sewald "First Sounds" Makes Phonautograms Talk In Fall 2007, David Giovannoni, Richard Martin, Meagan Hennessey, and I founded First Sounds, an informal collaboration of audio historians, sound archivists, scientists, and others who share our goal of making the world's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time.  Working together with Carl Haber and Earl Cornell of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, we recently succeeded in retrieving the oldest sound recordings audible today: phonautograms made between 1857 and 1878 and deposited at the French patent office (INPI) and Académie des Sciences, including a ten-second snippet of Au Clair de la Lune recorded on April 9, 1860 and premiered at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in March 2008.  You can read more about our initiative and listen to all the recordings we've recovered to date at FirstSounds.org. Read and listen: The First Prize-Winning Record (sort of) Homemade Tinfoil Phonographs Charles Smith turns a set of instructions from the Scientific American Supplement of July 20, 1878, into some working machines. Chronological List of U. S. Phonograph Patents, 1913-1919 (2,200+ entries) Latest Publications "Speech Acoustics and the Keyboard Telephone: Rethinking Edison's Discovery of the Phonograph Principle," ARSC Journal 38:1 (Spring 2007), 10-43.  I argue that, contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, the phonograph actually originated in 1877 as a byproduct of Thomas Edison's unsuccessful plan to build a "keyboard talking telegraph," an instrument that would have allowed users to "play" individual speech sounds over a telephone line rather than speaking them into a mouthpiece. Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s, Archeophone 1007, text coauthored with David Giovannoni, released May 2007.  Listen to a segment about this project from NPR's Weekend Edition (June 16), or read about it in the New York Times (July 8).  This CD was nominated for Grammy Awards in the Best Album Notes and Best Historical Album categories. My Dissertation: "The Following Record": Making Sense of Phonographic Performance, 1877-1908. My dissertation is now available through ProQuest, so if you'd like to read the abstract or order a copy, you can do so here.  (At 722 pages, a hard copy is a bargain even if you're just using it as a doorstop!)  I've also posted a Word file of the Introduction here. Photograph (c) 2006 Bethany G. Maas Our Phonograph Wedding On June 24, 2006, Ronda Sewald and I were married in Beck Chapel (on the campus of Indiana University), and in keeping with our interests, we found a prominent place in the event for the phonograph!  [Read more....] photo: Ronda L. Sewald