Thomas Patteson is a writer, teacher, and musician based in Philadelphia. He studied at New College of Florida, as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Cologne, and at the University of Pennsylvania. His book Instruments for New Music (2016), a history of experimental sound technologies in Germany in the early 20th century, won the 2017 Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society. From 2013 to 2023, Thomas was a member of the Musical Studies faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he taught 19th- and 20th-century music history and electives on popular music, electronic music, and improvisation. Non-academic and curatorial projects include People's Music Supply, an artist-led platform for creative music and community-building, the websites Possible Music (2023-) and the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (2013-), and collaborations with presenting organizations such as <fidget> and Bowerbird, where Thomas helped launch the Arcana New Music Ensemble in 2016. Recent publications include the essay "Ethereal Timbres" (co-written with Emily Dolan) and translations of texts by Theodor Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus for the Oxford Handbook of Timbre, an anthology that won the 2022 Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society. Current research projects include a historically-grounded argument for the re-integration of improvisation into music education, and an exploration of the connections between music, ritual, and altered states of consciousness.