Hello there

Well to be candible about it, this made my day

Browser extension by researchers at University of Chicago to detect AI songs generated by Udio v1.5 and Suno v5 - very high accuracy thanks to consistent artifacts in their frequency spectra inaudible to humans: www.etch-humanity.org/etch-lab/qui...

Talking about imaginary musical instruments, as Thomas Patteson and I are wont to do. The book is out in the US July 6, and we’re available for podcasts, events, and conversations. @reaktionbooks.bsky.social @uchicagopress.bsky.social

“I am happy my kids didn’t need to learn cursive.” Shock + horror. But seriously, this is a great post about why we have to keep asking what to offload to AI and what not, both now while the technical and cultural defaults are being built and always (as I try to do with 40k years of music tech)

Finally saw Project Hail Mary, which means now I can read about the production. Great interview with the sound designers of Rocky’s voice getting into how they did it and thought about it: www.motionpictures.org/2026/03/proj...

Focusing on the theme of Agency, this year’s track asks: how agency emerges, is exercised, is negotiated, and is contested through creative practice with AI.

A few interesting things about this AI overview result for my search for _oram unpublished ms “sounds of the past”_ (1/): First sentence (“there might be a mix-up in the title”) - That’s correct, I did misremember the title. Oram’s unpublished ms is actually called “Sound of the Past” (not Sounds)

“I love music history. Unless it goes too far back and then it’s boring.” My own kid. Obviously he means anything before 40,000 years ago

Spotify’s plan for an AI cover/remix tool is understandably getting the most attention. They also plan “Reserve” so subscribers can buy tix to their favorite artist before general sale. That seems smart, thanks largely to the broader mess ticketing is in news.northeastern.edu/2026/05/18/b...

In our house, “Mom music” means unmarketable music that is all of the genres and none of the genres, and takes at least a paragraph to explain what it sounds like

Wow, I love this framing for talking about technology in the age of AI! So many necessary monsters (to recall Borges)

quote with a fictional band that’s not Spinal Tap

Working through the playlist for The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments one track at a time over on Instagram. The latest was an especially fun one: the Ocarina of Time. www.instagram.com/deirdrelough/ Image from The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia featuring it and other fictophones of Hyrule

The perennial how to dress for 90 degrees and office air conditioning question

The disco ball icon arrived to my device. I’m predisposed to like disco balls but…I feel like this one communicates a lack of taste

Oh my, Grok’n Roll???

“It’s not that the prehensile hand came first…& then that allowed us to have the material culture…it’s the fact that we’re doing these amazing things that creates the selection pressure for the hand” - I find this coevolutionary logic relevant to music technology podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

According to this 1655 source, “Letters are the plow, which create the furrows out of which all matters of the mind can spring.” Was just talking with @hilaryporiss.bsky.social &c about this kind of value to handwriting in the music classroom. These letters seem best for some wild ideas

Discussions of forecasting and speculative history with LLMs got me thinking of Ted Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” - highly recommend

My husband, at our 13yo’s request, showing him how to use a tape deck: “You are going to be so ahead of the game” 13yo: “I don’t think the game is going to revolve around tapes”

Early concept art for the Death Star... From a 15th-century catalogue of designs for a variety of fantastic and often impossible inventions. More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-dreams-of-an-inventor-in-1420 #MayThe4thBeWithYou #MayThe4th

“The book is endlessly playful, if not playable.” Made my day, thank you for the thoughtful review @mathewlyons.bsky.social

Learning about “vintage LLM” Talkie. I thought surely the reason for the 1930 cutoff was to have an LLM trained on only public domain data. Did not occur to me the project motivator would be testing/developing prediction of the future

Thomas & I talked about our book on @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social, and how we got into this project with its cat pianos, computing dreams, and an 1885 satire that got the future of music tellingly wrong. newbooksnetwork.com/the-museum-o... @reaktionbooks.bsky.social @uchicagopress.bsky.social

The Bone Flute to Auto-Tune book cover is here, and I couldn’t ask for a cover that better captures the range of what’s inside. Forty Thousand Years of Music Technology, out November 2026 from @uchicagopress.bsky.social

Picked up Natalie Lawrence's enchanting Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and their Meanings thinking about imaginary instruments, but her chapter on "the horned sorcerer" got me thinking about Bone Flute to Auto-Tune.

After Thomas and I did an interview about MIMI yesterday, it occurred to me to make a playlist of music and musicians in the book. Of course there’s lots with no Spotify (or any worldly, for that matter) presence. Nonetheless, the playlist is suitably out there: open.spotify.com/playlist/57B...

On the necessity of music to imagine cosmic silence. From Margret Grebowicz, Whale Song (a Bloomsbury Object Lessons book)

J. G. Ballard had an acute sensitivity to sound and its speculative possibilities. In his stories, sound is no mere fleeting vibration. It accumulates on surfaces, it emanates from flowers, it reflects its listener like a mirror.

I think Ben Lerner may have totally described LLMs in 10:04 (2014): “…we can think of them as bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world…”

“This is my music - this is myself.” One of many phrases humorously, visually literalized ⬇️

“every time there’s this radical extension of the ability to capture or reproduce the voice, or the image, etc, it creates an interesting counterpressure on the arts it supposedly renders obsolete…1/2

Had to be time travel

O frabjous day for readers in the UK

“We do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to the human imagination… It is, one might say, a necessary monster.” -Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

My 11yo did a cover concept for Bone Flute to Auto-tune. I love it. Sorry to disappoint, there are no dinosaurs in the book

According to a radio play by Walter Benjamin (yes that one), the moon has a committee for Earth research. Their instruments are a spectrophone through which to see & hear everything on Earth; a parlamonium which translates human speech into music; and an oneiroscope for observing earthlings’ dreams.

“what you end up learning by getting really good at predicting the next word is a separate question. And it's an empirical question that is hard to answer with just a priori speculation about what is or isn't possible to learn in that way.” Episode of Many Minds podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

In 2009, Antares Audio Technologies (makers of AutoTune) announced Direct Mind Access: technology to transfer the music in your head directly to a DAW. No practice, no skill required. “The only limit is your imagination!” would, for the first time, actually be true.

#Conversations_to_remember 11yo: Did the [40,000 year old] bone flute work? Me: Yes 11yo: What was the earliest musical instrument that didn’t work?

Well that was fun 🥽 news.northeastern.edu/2026/03/17/r...

New evidence that sperm whale birth is miraculous, its cross-kin cooperation “raising questions about the cognitive architectures and communication systems that support and mediate these behaviors” news.northeastern.edu/2026/03/26/s...

In 1913, Luigi Russolo declared that the future of music was noise. Then he patented the instruments to make it: the intonarumori, noise-intoners he designed for a futurist orchestra.

Newly discovered jaw bone pushes earliest genetic evidence for domestic dogs back to 15,000 years ago (reminder: earliest known musical instrument is from about 40,000 years ago) www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

New field of extragalactic archaeology!? This kind of liminal knowing is very MIMI resonant: “this project was 50 percent theory and 50 percent observations, and you couldn't do one without the other. You need both to come to these conclusions." www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/space-a...

I don’t know about fake songs, but yes bots streaming them billions of times are fake listeners (and why AI and the streaming ecosystem seem like a match made in the other place) www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

This is a great essay. Fun fact: Goethe was not a fan of color keyboards - instruments that made a temporal art of colors (like this one) - b/c he disagreed with their enabling premise, namely an analogy between tones and colors founded on a theory of cosmic harmony rather than close observation

Adding Hyperion to my file of future worlds with acoustic pianos. “The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.”

One of the instruments that started it all: the cat piano. It recurs unsettlingly across centuries. We wrote about for @publicdomainrev.bsky.social in 2015. It’s among the imagined living instruments in our book with @reaktionbooks.bsky.social out in April publicdomainreview.org/essay/cat-pi...