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...

Coming soon! I have an essay in this on Daphne Oram’s visions for an art-science research center www.pennpress.org/978151282803...

CFP: Music and Machines - come talk about how new technologies and computational thinking have and are reshaping musical creation, performance and listening! Conference at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in December, proposals due June 30 www.journal.chigiana.org/call-chigian...

New to the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, Jonathan Ulman’s marvelous snare drums reimagined. And coming soon: The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, the book! By yours truly and Thomas Patteson, from @reaktionbooks.bsky.social in 2026 imaginaryinstruments.org/snare-drums-...

Learned about Tipu’s tiger-organ and Tania James’s book Loot from Anna Steppler’s excellent paper at a global keyboards workshop last week. In James’s words, this musical invention “extends the imagination” imaginaryinstruments.org/tipus-tiger/

The comic is a wellspring of invention. Happy April 1st from the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments - enjoy this classic! imaginaryinstruments.org/polyphonic-t...

New at the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments - Android Orpheus from a story by Jennifer Marie Brissett imaginaryinstruments.org/android-orph...

New to the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments! Personal music device and hand-cranked instrument from the film Prospect (2018) imaginaryinstruments.org/personal-mus...

Looking forward to more of this

Delighted to share that our edited volume, The Science Music Borderlands, won the 2024 Ruth Solie Award from the American Musicological Society! Thank you to all who helped on the project.

And it's here! From UChicagoPress, a musical exploration of human-or-machine logic and its alternatives, from androids to so-called AI

Tracks 34-37 Arca, “Riquiquí” (2020) & from Riquiquí; Bronze-Instances(1-100) (2020), the album of its 100 remixes via AI - or in her term that steps outside the usual frame of human comparison to contemplate machine capabilities, "intelligent sentience" youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Hexorcismos, Transfiguración (2020). An example of alternative to likening/comparing AI to human, Hexorcismos describes "approaching the Neural Network as an alchemical technology," which aptly characterizes the process of style transfer bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlay...

Trk 31 Holly Herndon, Jlin, Spawn “Godmother” (2019) lent itself to idea of AI acquiring sentience; listening to Jlin's "Expand" (2015) & "Embryo" (2021) (Trks 32-33) clarifies sound of a model trained on Herndon’s voice & transfer to Jlin’s music www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc9O...

Trks 29-30 are from Dadabots, Can't Play Instruments, Vol 1 (2021), an album of neural network-generated hardcore punk that continued the duo's front of humanless musical creation (while elsewhere @dadabots.bsky.social discuss "using the neural nets as an instrument") www.youtube.com/embed/Mzv9s2...

Track 28 Laetitia Sonami, “Breathing in Birds and Others” (2017) stands in for this artist talk by Sonami in 2013, where she demonstrated her bird with magnetic coils (47:40); this talk was my introduction to neural nets archive.org/details/sonami

George Lewis and Vijay Iyer in Concert (2012) with Voyager, which they discuss @ 36:30, foregrounding both its need for help to function and capacity for disobedience (a sociomusical imaginary for AI between the extremes of autonomous or "just a tool") www.youtube.com/watch?si=kkB...

Track 27 David Cope, “From Darkness, Light” (2010) illustrates one pole of AI in the socio-musical imaginary, with anthropomorphic name Emily Howell emphasizing humanlikeness and implying its generalization to autonomy, etc. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHJq...

Track 26 MNEK, “At Night (I Think About You)” (2016) youtu.be/ieTghzEjayY?...

Track 25 Flume featuring kai, “Never Be Like You” (2016) exemplifies ca. 2016 EDM-pop's taste for "feathery" female vocals t.co/xDWNlUSNW7

Track 24 Cher, “Believe (1998) www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXR...

Track 23 T-Pain featuring Ludacris, "Chopped N Skrewed" (2008). This 2001: A Space Odyssey parody really sums up autotune anxieties ca. 2008 www.youtube.com/watch?v=234v...

Track 22 Zara Larsson and MNEK, “Never Forget You” (2016). In contrast to pitched and chopped lead vocals, processed vocals in instrumental textures ex. 1:07-1:33

Track 21 Kiiara, "Gold" (2016). Producer Felix Snow described "manipulating vocals to sound like a computer and vice versa" as "the first tiny step toward the computer doing all of the singing"; Kiiara observed, "it's a sample. That's all it is."

Track 20 Remember this song? Its "yooo ooo ooo"s were the 2016 sound of "people don't want to sound like people anymore" (according to one music critic)

Annea Lockwood, Piano Burning (1968) www.utne.com/arts/bonfire...

New York Times 2012 coverage of pianos going to the dump & responses to it start Chapter 4’s inquiry into personifying pianos: www.nytimes.com/video/arts/m...

Excerpt from BBC radio program World at One (1972) in which Daphne Oram demonstrates her “method of translating visual wave patterns into musical sound, in a way that retains the human element” research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/26...

The 1968 concert also featured Peter Zinovieff's "Partita for Unattended Computer," which garnered media attention as the "first concert performance ever by a computer." Featured in this 1968 Tomorrow's World episode - what became sound of "computer thinking" at 3:40 www.bbc.co.uk/archive/pete...

Trk 19 "Contrasts Essconic" by Daphne Oram, performed at the First London Concert of Electronic Music by British Composers (1968). Its contrasts were in mood & sound sources, which included piano, tone generators, musique concrète & the debut of Oramics,

Trk 18 "Four Aspects" by Daphne Oram (1960). Oram used to show crescendo more than increased volume: "To get a real feeling of crescendo one has got to...put more & more high frequencies into the tone color as well.” Why electronic composers should study “comprehension of the mind.” Listen 2:16-3:37

Trk 17 This François Couperin harpsichord piece (1713) features technique of delaying melody note for crescendo effect (illusion of starting on time & growing louder). Was to "give soul to the instrument" & makes harpsichord exemplary of music entangling matter & mind. Effect @ :56, 1:02, esp. 1:17

Track 16 From a violin sonata by Michele Mascitti (1706), illustrates continuous "voice" sound of violin but played on viola da gamba would illustrate a "sparkling sound" combining melodic voice w/ harmony of resonance (according to a viol defender in 1740) open.spotify.com/track/5a3Bya...

Track 15 In contrast to the lute-imitative piece, this viola da gamba piece by Marin Marais imitates bells, makes extreme use of letting strings ring (ex. :40), and suggests what a defender of the viol against the violin's rising popularity meant by its ability to reconcile voice & resonance

Track 14 This viola da gamba piece by Marin Marais imitates the style of a plucked lute, and captures a perception of lute sound quickly decaying - "tic tac" - rather than ringing out open.spotify.com/track/18taOz...

Track 13 This Prelude for viola da gamba by Marin Marais features letting strings ring, a technique criticized for "stand[ing] in the way" of melody. Compare the beginning (continuous melody) to ~1:35-2:00 (technique used to let notes ring while playing others) open.spotify.com/track/7isYYf...

This image, from a 1615 treatise on machines by Salomon de Caus, depicts of a mechanical grotto featuring Orpheus playing a viola da gamba: Orpheus's bowing arm moves and a hydraulic organ plays from behind the scene