Robert Archer's *Nature's Dream Harp* is a delightful privately released album from 1979 featuring a homemade aeolian harp (that fully acoustic yet oddly electronic-sounding string instrument played by the wind).

zachary cooper, "the innovation paradox" the point of copyright is theoretically to stimulate innovation, but the more innovation we have the more confused copyright gets--when everyone can turn everything into everything else #ilwip

What kind of instrument is the Doof Warrior’s guitar in Mad Max Fury Road? I’d call it analogical - bedpan as guitar body, trumpet keys as pickups, neck as flamethrower barrel. Real objects forming an imaginary musical instrument news.northeastern.edu/2026/03/05/m...

And wow, that’s pretty incredible

Excellent post, highly recommend

To be fair, the authors say the “singularity benign” and “singularity extinction” lines are speculative extremes, and the point is the middle lines. But this is a very haha-crying data visualization to see from a Federal Reserve Bank www.dallasfed.org/research/eco... h/t vergecast @theverge.com

(Imaginary) musical instrument applications: “When shoes slide across a floor, wave-like deformations of the sole can generate squeaking. The pitch of the squeak depends on the rate at which deformations are generated.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Fascinating: “This combination [of 1:1 and 2:1 rhythmic patterns] was only observed in ants and the most ant-dependent caterpillar species, suggesting the two species have evolved a coordinated rhythm pattern driven by their close ecological interaction.” warwick.ac.uk/news/pressre...

Finally read Klara and the Sun, which has been on my list since I heard about it at the “Reading Minds” @litsciarts.org conference several years ago. Notable musical moment: Klara (an Artificial Friend) is asked to sing a harmonic minor scale as a test of her abilities; she opts not to respond

“I look forward to getting beyond the imitative homogenizing LLM approach and seeing whatever comes next.” Great interview with Laurie Spiegel: www.theverge.com/report/87981...

“e-mail of Theseus” 🚢

In the UK? Lucky you! There’s a pre-order promotion on The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, which book you can hold in your hands in April (in the US we have to wait until July) Order from Waterstones by Feb 20th w/ code FEB26 for the discount @reaktionbooks.bsky.social #WPreorder

Next week, we’re talking about our virtual museum and forthcoming @reaktionbooks.bsky.social book on imaginary musical instruments. For anyone interested in organology, unrealized technologies, or a cultural history of creative thought.

I hope this is an art project www.moltbook.com

A snow day is the perfect day to visit the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments and check out our newest addition: a 1927 vision for a gigantic, pipe-organ-sized “polyharp” as the “inevitable transformation of the harp” imaginaryinstruments.org/polyharp/

I disagree with the argument that AI is a cliche machine incapable of leaps or surprise (that’s a design choice), but think we don’t need such a premise to agree with “defending and encouraging the human ambition to make art, unassisted, whether successful or otherwise.” aeon.co/essays/sure-...

Copyedits are in!

Happy public domain day to compositions from 1930 and sound recordings from 1925 web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicd...

For our family kiddos from the West Coast, this is the “Waymo piano” 🤯 🤖

MIDI : digital musical instruments :: MCP : AI agents? www.anthropic.com/news/donatin...

Quantum Arts: the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University seeks an artist-research to join our faculty in quantum arts or the broader area of the arts and unconventional computing. Please share! northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/career...

Major country stars like Jelly Roll are being pitched music with their own voices deepfaked onto the demo tracks, just a small part of how AI tools like Suno have taken over Nashville. Wild piece by @charlieharding.bsky.social for us -> www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

That AI country song? It was top of the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales Chart: “as any music listener can tell you, there aren't many people buying digital copies of singles anymore. Over on Spotify's Country Top 50 chart, Breaking Rust is nowhere to be found…" mashable.com/article/ai-c...

2010s: What if there were a course about 40,000 years of music tech? Berkeley: Let’s try it Northeastern: Let’s make it official 2025: It’s a book in production w/ UChicago Press Fall ‘26: You can read Bone Flute to Auto-tune: Forty Thousand Years of Music Technology! @uchicagopress.bsky.social

A reminder that whatever you may see online, The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future is available from MIT Press for free open access (or $60 paperback)

@theverge.com got me to subscribe with this one! Great read on the rise of algorithmic recommendation & how it shapes what we hear, though I’m not sure algo rebellion is stronger now than at the start & submit “Golden” as counter-evidence to simplification/flattening www.theverge.com/column/81574...

“…wrong to imply that there’s something intrinsically bad about songs that are designed to fit an algorithm, or a market…The only way to separate good [pop music] from bad [pop music] is to listen closely—and, perhaps, to argue about it.” www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Enjoy limited-time free access to the current issues of UC Press music journals during #AMS2025, including JAMS, JM, @iaspm-us.bsky.social's JPMS, @sssmg.bsky.social's JSMG, MP, NCM, and RES, www.ucpress.edu/blog-posts/f...

A hundred years ago John Hays Hammond Jr invented a pedal-controlled shutter mechanism for pianos to control the sound after depressing the keys and had a castle built in Gloucester MA, and somehow I’m just now learning about this hub.catalogit.app/hammond-cast...

Reading with my 11yo: Some say it means “so-so,” or “maybe this, maybe that”… [silent skepticism] Some youngsters, sensing an opportunity to reliably frustrate their elders, will use it to stand in for a reply to just about any question [YES THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS] www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-th...

🧐 www.universalmusic.com/universal-mu...

Index for The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/the-mus... @reaktionbooks.bsky.social ) submitted! It starts:

“To cultivate the imagination…of our students in a way that is neither frivolous nor superficial, we need to show them what has come before…Such courses are not…shrines to obsolete relics.They are the furrows in which the creative thinking of the future is planted.” www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

Great conversation here podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

Pleased that our Voice and Sound issue of Diderot Studies is finally out! Take a look at this fantastic slate of authors, who explore Diderot’s transdisciplinary thought on voice and sound as material, rhetorical, and embodied phenomena www.droz.org/monde/produc...

This is an incredible stat. The rise of overall vinyl sales since 2006 is also pretty incredible (regardless of the comparison to the 1970s-mid 80s) www.statista.com/chart/amp/76...

I’ve long been fascinated by the recurrence of very similar debates around new music technologies across centuries…now I find myself wondering how much the echoes I hear are thanks to the same old means of cultural transmission, how much thanks to LLM text generation? www.cnet.com/tech/service...

news.berkeley.edu/2025/10/02/f... “Why these fish need to hear high frequencies is a mystery, though it may be because they live in diverse and complicated environments, from rushing streams to static lakes.”

“Bone Flute to Autotune: 40,000 Years of Music Technology” is becoming a book! I hope it enables many more people to teach, learn & think critically about the long history of music technology. If you or someone you know would have occasion to test drive a chapter, please get in touch!

Pop Conference 2026 is accepting submissions through Oct 22 www.popconference.org

Goodbye AOL dialup. May your sounds live on www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-...

Boston area folks: come hear the Wiggly Tendrils at Brookline Porchfest this Saturday, we’re one of 10 groups to watch for! A quirky “cross between a farmer’s market string band, and Star Wars cantina band” brookline.news/going-to-por...

Great essay!

We are in proofs! The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments book coming in 2026 @reaktionbooks.bsky.social

Wow

This is interesting. I googled “I idolized Billie and her songs” (in quotation marks) b/c I wanted to find places where this actual Ella Fitzgerald quote about Billie Holiday has been discussed. I got this. Organizing the world’s information doesn’t mean what it used to.

I enjoyed this article, can’t wait to try blank drecking pitchfork.com/thepitch/how...

Music and Machines CFP reminder, deadline soon! #musicology #musictechnology

Meta may have won their generative AI case but the ruling is really worth a read. “Courts can’t stick their heads in the sand to an obvious way that new technology might severely harm the incentive to create, just because the issue has not come up before…. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Philip K. Dick’s “The Preserving Machine” is now at the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments. Such a weird and fascinating story of a machine for preserving musical scores by turning them into animals (spoiler alert: does not work as envisioned) imaginaryinstruments.org/the-preservi...