Peter Paul Kellogg was professor of ornithology and biological acoustics at Cornell University. Together with Arthur Allen and Albert Brand, he developed new techniques and instruments for recording animal (particularly bird) vocalizations. As director of the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds in the 1950s, he continued to play a role in consolidating bioacoustics as a new discipline and promoting popular understanding of acoustics in the natural world.

Kellogg was appointed assistant professor of ornithology at Cornell University in 1938 after participating in pioneering efforts to devise new instruments and techniques to record and study birdsong in the wild, together with professor of ornithology Arthur A. Allen and Albert R. Brand. Kellogg devoted most of his attention to establishing better equipment for fieldwork in bioacoustics. With his student Peter Keane, he started using a wartime parabolic shape to record natural sounds (taking inspiration from recording practices in theater and sports reporting). During World War II, Kellogg organized and directed a radar school for Western Electric and was recruited to investigate acoustic problems confronting the US Army in jungle and forested environments in the Panama Canal zone. Later he worked with the Amplifier Corporation of America to develop the first commercially produced field tape recorder, which was marketed in 1952 and was promptly adopted by most investigators in natural history recording, thus greatly expanding the possibilities for work in this area. Thanks to Allen and Kellogg’s efforts, Cornell became acknowledged as one of the principal centers of ornithological education and research in the United States, leading among other things to the formal recognition of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology as a Cornell University institute. Kellogg and the Lab of Ornithology became a prolific publisher of natural sound recordings on gramophone, which helped to subsidize the Laboratory and its activities.