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.
