Sounding Human : Music and Machines, 1740/2020.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Loughridge, Deirdre.

Series:

New Material Histories of Music Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Auto-tune (Computer file).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (251 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Summary:

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 a "sound wave instrument" 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.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

List of Audio Examples

Introduction: Sounding Human with Machines

1: Becoming Android: Reinterpreting the Automaton Flute Player

2: Hybrids: Voice &amp

Resonance

3: Analogies: Diderot's Harpsichord &amp

Oram's Machine

4: Personifications: Piano Death &amp

Life

5: Genres of Being Posthuman: Chopped &amp

Pitched

Coda: Learning Machines

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Other Format:

Print version: Loughridge, Deirdre Sounding Human

ISBN:

0-226-83010-1

OCLC:

1409031685