Description
Book SynopsisAn expansive analysis of the relationship between human and machine in music. From the mid-eighteenth century on, there was a logic at work in musical discourse and practice: human or machine. That discourse defined a boundary of absolute difference between human and machine, with a recurrent practice of parsing human musicality from its merely mechanical simulations. In Sounding Human, Deirdre Loughridge tests and traverses these boundaries, unmaking the human or machine logic and seeking out others, better characterized by conjunctions such as and or with. Sounding Human enters the debate on posthumanism and human-machine relationships in music, exploring how categories of human and machine have been continually renegotiated over the centuries. Loughridge expertly traces this debate from the 1737 invention of what became the first musical androidto the creation of a sound wave instrument by a British electronic music composer in the 1960s, and the chopped and pitched vocals pro
Trade Review“In this dexterous book, Loughridge traces the seams in our understanding of humans and machines. Gathering examples from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first,
Sounding Human illustrates how musical technologies have provided new models for thinking about some of our deepest philosophical questions. Loughridge writes as masterfully about bells and harpsichords as she does about vocoders and neural nets, making clear that the boundary between people and devices has never been as clear as it seems.” * Nick Seaver, Tufts University *
“Loughridge’s brilliant and elegant book delves into the foundational relationships between humans, machines, and music. Through an array of case studies covering more than three centuries, she exposes the impossibility of drawing divisions between humans and their mechanical companions. Loughridge shows the ways in which modern ideas of what makes us (sound) human were forged precisely through repeated negotiations with machines.” * Emily Dolan, Brown University *
Table of ContentsList of Audio Examples
Introduction: Sounding Human with Machines
1: Becoming Android: Reinterpreting the Automaton Flute Player
2: Hybrids: Voice & Resonance
3: Analogies: Diderot’s Harpsichord & Oram’s Machine
4: Personifications: Piano Death & Life
5: Genres of Being Posthuman: Chopped & Pitched
Coda: Learning Machines
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
