Sounding Human

Loughridge's study examines how music has been used to draw the line between people and machines. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, writing about music tended to assume that the two were opposites, and it often separated true human musicianship from imitations judged to be only mechanical. Rather than accept that either-or framing, the book tests its limits and looks for other ways to describe the relationship, using connecting words such as and or with. It joins current debates about posthumanism and the link between people and machines in music, and it shows how these categories have been reworked again and again over the centuries. The chronology runs from 1737, when the first automaton built to play music appeared, to a 1960s instrument made by a British electronic composer that worked with sound waves, and on to the pitched and chopped vocals created by sampling singers' voices in modern pop. Along the way the book considers music-generating software, older instruments, and musical notation, arguing that machines have long shaped how music is composed. In the end, Loughridge shows that musical objects can be used to clarify and to challenge what it means to be human.