Overview

An 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 android to the creation of “sound wave instruments” by a British electronic music composer in the 1960s, and the chopped and pitched vocals produced by sampling singers’ voices in modern pop music. From music-generating computer programs to older musical instruments and music notation, Sounding Human shows how machines have always actively shaped the act of music composition. In doing so, Loughridge reveals how musical artifacts have been—or can be—used to help explain and contest what it is to be human.

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Reviews

“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 *

Author Information

Deirdre Loughridge is associate professor in the Department of Music at Northeastern University. She is the author of Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism and coeditor of The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future.

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