“I have not made my mind up to admire everything new.  I am trying to distinguish the good from the bad so that the energies liberated by the good should not be lost.” (Guillaume Apollinaire)

My name is Thomas Patteson, and I started Acousmata in February 2009 in order create a public forum for my idiosyncratic exploration of music history.  Although I try to keep my ears open to all things, my primary interests include:

• Electronic and experimental music, especially in their historical origins
• Organology (study of musical instruments)
• Acoustics and the phenomenology of sound
• Alternative systems of tuning
• Techno-aesthetics
• Strange pockets of popular music (continental European progressive rock, post-punk synth-pop/early industrial, and space-age bachelor pad music)

By day, I am a student in the PhD program in Music History at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where I am writing a dissertation on sound technologies and musical modernism in early 20th-century Germany.  

I spend a lot of time working on Acousmata and intend to make it one of the best and most adventurous music blogs on the web.  I’m happy to hear suggestions for improvement and I welcome your comments and requests. You can also contact me via email.

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