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Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020

Online ISBN:
9780226830100
Print ISBN:
9780226830094
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020

Deirdre Loughridge
Deirdre Loughridge
Northeastern University
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Published online:
23 May 2024
Published in print:
15 December 2023
Online ISBN:
9780226830100
Print ISBN:
9780226830094
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Sounding Human is about the making and breaking of human-versus-machine logic in and through music. From the mid-eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, a resilient “human or machine” logic in musical discourse and practice has shaped particular anxieties and predictions for the future. This book examines edge cases of this cultural formation, tracing human-machine relations from the 1737 invention of what became the first musical android to the creation of a “sound wave instrument” by a British electronic music composer in the 1960s, the chopped and pitched vocals in modern pop music, and musical experiments with machine learning. Each chapter addresses a figure of relation between human and machine—android, hybrid, analogy, personification, and posthuman—through examples that move from French Enlightenment makings of “sounding human versus machine” to twenty-first century needs for alternative configurations. As a site of real and imaginary relations between humans and machines, music has been central to the experience, definition, and transformation of these categories. Through histories of musical automata pleasurably imagined to be sensible, string instruments considered machines, the voice as a hybrid string-wind instrument, bells sounding harmonious rather than nonhuman, philosophers analogized to harpsichords, machines needing to be humanized, humans being made up of sound electronics, pianos being like people, and people sounding posthuman, Sounding Human enters the debate on posthumanism and human-machine relationships in music, and explores how categories of human and machine have been continually renegotiated over the centuries.

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