Publications and Research

Select Publications

A red dot indicates an item that you can read (or hear) in full by following the link provided.

• "Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville: An Annotated Discography," ARSC Journal, forthcoming.
• "Reconfiguring the History of Early Cinema Through the Phonograph, 1877-1908," coauthored with Jacob Smith, Film History: An International Journal 21:4 (December 2009), 311-325.
• The Phonautographic Manuscripts of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (Bloomington, Indiana: FirstSounds.org, Dec. 2009); see also the Phonozoic archive of First Sounds PDF publications, including the "Working Papers."
• "Daguerreotyping the Voice: Léon Scott's Phonautographic Aspirations," in Parole #1: The Body of the Voice / Stimmkörper, ed. Annette Stahmer (Cologne, Germany: Salon Verlag, 2009):18-23.
• Debate '08: Taft and Bryan Campaign on the Edison Phonograph, Archeophone 1008, essay and transcriptions, released September 2008.
  
• "Speech Acoustics and the Keyboard Telephone: Rethinking Edison's Discovery of the Phonograph Principle," ARSC Journal 38:1 (Spring 2007), 10-43.
• Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s, Archeophone 1007, text coauthored with David Giovannoni, released May 2007.
• “‘Fellow Townsmen and My Noble Constituents!’: Representations of Oratory on Early Commercial Recordings,” coauthored with Richard Bauman, Oral Tradition 20:1 (2005):35-57.
• "Oratorical Footing in a New Medium: Recordings of Presidential Campaign Speeches, 1896-1912," coauthored with Richard Bauman, Texas Linguistic Forum 46 (2003): Texas Linguistic Society Proceedings.
• "Framing the Mechanical Voice: Generic Conventions of Early Sound Recording," Folklore Forum 32 (2001):57-102.

Some Recent Presentations

• "New Directions in Phonautographic History," Association for Recorded Sound Collections conference in Washington DC, May 29, 2009. Both the "script" and audio may be accessed here.
• "The Quest for the World's Oldest Recorded Sounds," Audio Engineering Society Chicago section meeting, Nov. 20, 2008.
• "From Echo To Tinfoil: The Early Phonograph in Light of Its Prehistory," Association for Recorded Sound Collections conference in Palo Alto, California, March 28, 2008. Audio of the entire conference, including my presentation, is available here.

photo: Ronda L. Sewald

Research Interests

The social and cultural history and prehistory of the phonograph, telephone, and other sound media, with a focus on reconfigurations of speech and performance and the methodical use of sound recordings themselves as texts for analysis.

Dissertation and Manuscripts

My dissertation, which I defended in April 2007, is entitled "The Following Record": Making Sense of Phonographic Performance, 1877-1908.  You can order a hard copy from ProQuest if you like; at over 700 pages, you'd probably come out ahead in terms of sheer raw materials!

I've completed a draft manuscript called The Phonograph Fakir: Making Sense of Early Recorded Sound, combining some much revised highlights of the dissertation with other new material—currently shopping it around to potential publishers.

Other book-length manuscripts in the works: A Prehistory of Modern Sound Media (pre-Edison "phonographs" and "talking machines," telephonic precursors, etc.); and The Man Who Made Millions Laugh, a study of the life and work of phonographic raconteur Cal Stewart.

See also a collection of media reports describing projects and publications with which I've been involved.