Deirdre Loughridge
@deirdrelough.bsky.social
Musicologist / music historian. Author of Sounding Human: Music and Machines 1740/2020 https://deirdreloughridge.wordpress.com/books/
That AI country song? It was top of the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales Chart: “as any music listener can tell you, there aren't many people buying digital copies of singles anymore. Over on Spotify's Country Top 50 chart, Breaking Rust is nowhere to be found…" mashable.com/article/ai-c...
Fact check: Did an AI country song reach No. 1 on Billboard?
Did you hear that an AI country song hit the top of the Billboard country charts? Well, you can't believe everything you hear.
mashable.com
November 16, 2025 at 2:16 PM
That AI country song? It was top of the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales Chart: “as any music listener can tell you, there aren't many people buying digital copies of singles anymore. Over on Spotify's Country Top 50 chart, Breaking Rust is nowhere to be found…" mashable.com/article/ai-c...
2010s: What if there were a course about 40,000 years of music tech?
Berkeley: Let’s try it
Northeastern: Let’s make it official
2025: It’s a book in production w/ UChicago Press
Fall ‘26: You can read Bone Flute to Auto-tune: Forty Thousand Years of Music Technology!
@uchicagopress.bsky.social
Berkeley: Let’s try it
Northeastern: Let’s make it official
2025: It’s a book in production w/ UChicago Press
Fall ‘26: You can read Bone Flute to Auto-tune: Forty Thousand Years of Music Technology!
@uchicagopress.bsky.social
November 13, 2025 at 10:55 PM
2010s: What if there were a course about 40,000 years of music tech?
Berkeley: Let’s try it
Northeastern: Let’s make it official
2025: It’s a book in production w/ UChicago Press
Fall ‘26: You can read Bone Flute to Auto-tune: Forty Thousand Years of Music Technology!
@uchicagopress.bsky.social
Berkeley: Let’s try it
Northeastern: Let’s make it official
2025: It’s a book in production w/ UChicago Press
Fall ‘26: You can read Bone Flute to Auto-tune: Forty Thousand Years of Music Technology!
@uchicagopress.bsky.social
A reminder that whatever you may see online, The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future is available from MIT Press for free open access (or $60 paperback)
November 11, 2025 at 10:30 PM
A reminder that whatever you may see online, The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future is available from MIT Press for free open access (or $60 paperback)
@theverge.com got me to subscribe with this one! Great read on the rise of algorithmic recommendation & how it shapes what we hear, though I’m not sure algo rebellion is stronger now than at the start & submit “Golden” as counter-evidence to simplification/flattening www.theverge.com/column/81574...
The algorithm failed music
True music discovery has suffered.
www.theverge.com
November 11, 2025 at 12:33 AM
@theverge.com got me to subscribe with this one! Great read on the rise of algorithmic recommendation & how it shapes what we hear, though I’m not sure algo rebellion is stronger now than at the start & submit “Golden” as counter-evidence to simplification/flattening www.theverge.com/column/81574...
“…wrong to imply that there’s something intrinsically bad about songs that are designed to fit an algorithm, or a market…The only way to separate good [pop music] from bad [pop music] is to listen closely—and, perhaps, to argue about it.” www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge
Music writers were once known for being much crankier than the average listener. What happened?
www.newyorker.com
November 9, 2025 at 12:38 AM
“…wrong to imply that there’s something intrinsically bad about songs that are designed to fit an algorithm, or a market…The only way to separate good [pop music] from bad [pop music] is to listen closely—and, perhaps, to argue about it.” www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Reposted by Deirdre Loughridge
Enjoy limited-time free access to the current issues of UC Press music journals during #AMS2025, including JAMS, JM, @iaspm-us.bsky.social's JPMS, @sssmg.bsky.social's JSMG, MP, NCM, and RES, www.ucpress.edu/blog-posts/f...
Free Content from UC Press Journals during the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting
Enjoy limited-time free access to current issues of UC Press's music journals during the joint American Musicological Society-Society for Music Theory Annual Conference.
www.ucpress.edu
November 6, 2025 at 10:48 PM
Enjoy limited-time free access to the current issues of UC Press music journals during #AMS2025, including JAMS, JM, @iaspm-us.bsky.social's JPMS, @sssmg.bsky.social's JSMG, MP, NCM, and RES, www.ucpress.edu/blog-posts/f...
A hundred years ago John Hays Hammond Jr invented a pedal-controlled shutter mechanism for pianos to control the sound after depressing the keys and had a castle built in Gloucester MA, and somehow I’m just now learning about this hub.catalogit.app/hammond-cast...
Hammond Castle Museum - 1930 Chickering Grand Piano
1930 Chickering grand piano.
Composite wood with black finish.
originally in Bungalow
Previously outfitted with a Hammond invention of shutters to control the sound. This was one of 3 "Tonal" pianos...
hub.catalogit.app
November 4, 2025 at 12:21 AM
A hundred years ago John Hays Hammond Jr invented a pedal-controlled shutter mechanism for pianos to control the sound after depressing the keys and had a castle built in Gloucester MA, and somehow I’m just now learning about this hub.catalogit.app/hammond-cast...
Reading with my 11yo: Some say it means “so-so,” or “maybe this, maybe that”… [silent skepticism] Some youngsters, sensing an opportunity to reliably frustrate their elders, will use it to stand in for a reply to just about any question [YES THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS] www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-th...
Dictionary.com’s 2025 Word of the Year Is… - Dictionary.com
Each year, Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year and short-listed nominees capture pivotal moments in language and culture. These words serve as a linguistic time capsule, reflecting social trends and glo...
www.dictionary.com
November 1, 2025 at 1:48 PM
Reading with my 11yo: Some say it means “so-so,” or “maybe this, maybe that”… [silent skepticism] Some youngsters, sensing an opportunity to reliably frustrate their elders, will use it to stand in for a reply to just about any question [YES THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS] www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-th...
Index for The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/the-mus... @reaktionbooks.bsky.social ) submitted! It starts:
October 26, 2025 at 10:22 PM
Index for The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/the-mus... @reaktionbooks.bsky.social ) submitted! It starts:
“To cultivate the imagination…of our students in a way that is neither frivolous nor superficial, we need to show them what has come before…Such courses are not…shrines to obsolete relics.They are the furrows in which the creative thinking of the future is planted.” www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
Opinion | The Corporatization of Creativity
Our ways of thinking about thinking are a product of postwar business culture.
www.chronicle.com
October 26, 2025 at 9:26 PM
“To cultivate the imagination…of our students in a way that is neither frivolous nor superficial, we need to show them what has come before…Such courses are not…shrines to obsolete relics.They are the furrows in which the creative thinking of the future is planted.” www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
Great conversation here podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...
Monsters and their makers
Podcast Episode · Many Minds · 10/23/2025 · 1h 6m
podcasts.apple.com
October 25, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Great conversation here podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...
Pleased that our Voice and Sound issue of Diderot Studies is finally out! Take a look at this fantastic slate of authors, who explore Diderot’s transdisciplinary thought on voice and sound as material, rhetorical, and embodied phenomena www.droz.org/monde/produc...
October 13, 2025 at 5:45 PM
Pleased that our Voice and Sound issue of Diderot Studies is finally out! Take a look at this fantastic slate of authors, who explore Diderot’s transdisciplinary thought on voice and sound as material, rhetorical, and embodied phenomena www.droz.org/monde/produc...
This is an incredible stat. The rise of overall vinyl sales since 2006 is also pretty incredible (regardless of the comparison to the 1970s-mid 80s) www.statista.com/chart/amp/76...
October 12, 2025 at 12:06 PM
This is an incredible stat. The rise of overall vinyl sales since 2006 is also pretty incredible (regardless of the comparison to the 1970s-mid 80s) www.statista.com/chart/amp/76...
I’ve long been fascinated by the recurrence of very similar debates around new music technologies across centuries…now I find myself wondering how much the echoes I hear are thanks to the same old means of cultural transmission, how much thanks to LLM text generation? www.cnet.com/tech/service...
You Can Have ChatGPT Make You a Spotify Playlist. But Why Would You?
Commentary: No, I don't want ChatGPT to have anything to do with my music.
www.cnet.com
October 9, 2025 at 5:37 PM
I’ve long been fascinated by the recurrence of very similar debates around new music technologies across centuries…now I find myself wondering how much the echoes I hear are thanks to the same old means of cultural transmission, how much thanks to LLM text generation? www.cnet.com/tech/service...
news.berkeley.edu/2025/10/02/f... “Why these fish need to hear high frequencies is a mystery, though it may be because they live in diverse and complicated environments, from rushing streams to static lakes.”
Fossilized ear bones rewrite the history of freshwater fish - Berkeley News
Analysis of well-preserved bony structures in the middle ear of a 67 million-year-old fossil suggests that oceanic fish invaded Earth's streams and lakes multiple times — developing improved hearing a...
news.berkeley.edu
October 9, 2025 at 3:41 PM
news.berkeley.edu/2025/10/02/f... “Why these fish need to hear high frequencies is a mystery, though it may be because they live in diverse and complicated environments, from rushing streams to static lakes.”
“Bone Flute to Autotune: 40,000 Years of Music Technology” is becoming a book! I hope it enables many more people to teach, learn & think critically about the long history of music technology. If you or someone you know would have occasion to test drive a chapter, please get in touch!
October 4, 2025 at 12:18 PM
“Bone Flute to Autotune: 40,000 Years of Music Technology” is becoming a book! I hope it enables many more people to teach, learn & think critically about the long history of music technology. If you or someone you know would have occasion to test drive a chapter, please get in touch!
Pop Conference 2026 is accepting submissions through Oct 22 www.popconference.org
PopCon | 2026
PopCon is the premier music writing and popular music studies conference.
www.popconference.org
October 3, 2025 at 7:40 PM
Pop Conference 2026 is accepting submissions through Oct 22 www.popconference.org
Goodbye AOL dialup. May your sounds live on www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-...
The sound of the dialup, pictured
If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember how it sounded. But what do these sounds mean?
www.windytan.com
September 30, 2025 at 11:08 AM
Goodbye AOL dialup. May your sounds live on www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-...
Boston area folks: come hear the Wiggly Tendrils at Brookline Porchfest this Saturday, we’re one of 10 groups to watch for! A quirky “cross between a farmer’s market string band, and Star Wars cantina band” brookline.news/going-to-por...
Going to Porchfest this weekend? Here are 10 groups to watch for - Brookline.News
Brookline Porchfest happens Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., so get ready to roam the streets and soak up all kinds of music. The lineup features more than 100 bands whose self-described genres range ...
brookline.news
September 24, 2025 at 10:57 PM
Boston area folks: come hear the Wiggly Tendrils at Brookline Porchfest this Saturday, we’re one of 10 groups to watch for! A quirky “cross between a farmer’s market string band, and Star Wars cantina band” brookline.news/going-to-por...
Great essay!
My essay on the tense relationship between authors and AI, as embodied in a major lawsuit against Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now in the Chronicle of Higher Education: www.chronicle.com/article/what...
Opinion | What a New Landmark AI Settlement Will Mean for Authors
Creators should demand credit, not just compensation.
www.chronicle.com
September 24, 2025 at 10:02 PM
Great essay!
We are in proofs! The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments book coming in 2026 @reaktionbooks.bsky.social
September 19, 2025 at 10:01 PM
We are in proofs! The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments book coming in 2026 @reaktionbooks.bsky.social
Wow
September 18, 2025 at 8:29 PM
Wow
This is interesting. I googled “I idolized Billie and her songs” (in quotation marks) b/c I wanted to find places where this actual Ella Fitzgerald quote about Billie Holiday has been discussed. I got this. Organizing the world’s information doesn’t mean what it used to.
August 8, 2025 at 1:27 AM
This is interesting. I googled “I idolized Billie and her songs” (in quotation marks) b/c I wanted to find places where this actual Ella Fitzgerald quote about Billie Holiday has been discussed. I got this. Organizing the world’s information doesn’t mean what it used to.
I enjoyed this article, can’t wait to try blank drecking pitchfork.com/thepitch/how...
How to Dig for Music Without Spotify
Rabbit Holed is Kieran Press-Reynolds’ weekly column exploring songs and scenes at the intersection of music and digital culture, separating shitpost genius from shitpassé lameness. This week’s column...
pitchfork.com
August 2, 2025 at 4:10 PM
I enjoyed this article, can’t wait to try blank drecking pitchfork.com/thepitch/how...