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...

Loved Project Hail Mary the book. Kind of nervous for the movie

Paul Ford @ftrain.bsky.social discusses AI music use cases on @theverge.com Vergecast, and against the rising tide of Suno slop they give me hope for the future www.theverge.com/podcast/8959...

Torricelli's trumpet stretches to infinity. To paint its outer surface, all the paint in the universe wouldn't be enough. But to fill it with paint, you just need exactly π cubic units.  It also has another name: Gabriel’s horn.

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...