Ben Houtman

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Benjamin Houtman (Julie Maness)

Ben is an assistant archivist at WNYC.

Ben was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, but was nurtured in the art of sound. As a young man he followed the call of music to Austin, spending years as a touring and recording musician before "retiring" to attend the University of Texas. He graduated with highest honors with a baccalaureate in sociology in 2008, only to again heed his muse’s call, breaking his retirement almost immediately to return to the music scene he loves.

Thankfully, that love matured, as all true loves do, gradually manifesting itself as a desire to fulfill his spiritual debt to the history of recorded sound, and in 2013 Ben enrolled in UT’s School of Information, where he would focus on archives, copyright, and audio preservation. During his time at the iSchool, Ben worked on several collections for the Briscoe Center for American History and others, and was hand-selected to serve as teaching assistant for the school's audio and copyright courses. Ben was also the recipient of the Mary E. Cleveland Centennial Endowed Scholarship and worked for the Historical Music Recording Collection at UT's Fine Arts Library, one of the largest audio archives in the United States. He graduated from the iSchool with a Masters of Science in Information Studies in 2015.

Ben joined WNYC in 2015 to work on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, appraising, cataloging, preserving, mapping, and writing articles about archival audio from the New York City Municipal Archives’ WNYC collection.

He lives in Brooklyn with his amazing wife Julie and their two cats. This is his Survival Kit:

1. Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths
2. Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch
3. Walter Gieseking - Preludes (Debussy), or Fats Waller's 1937 solo piano performance of "I Ain't Got Nobody"
   
4. Dorothea Tanning - "Some Roses and their Phantoms"
   
5. Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a traveler...
6. A melodica (or a Casio SK-1)
7. A stack of New York Times acrostic puzzles
8. And one of these: The National - Alligator, Guided by Voices - Alien Lanes, Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, or Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet, he can't decide which.