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)

Index for The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/the-mus... @reaktionbooks.bsky.social ) submitted! It starts:

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...

“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!

We are in proofs! The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments book coming in 2026 @reaktionbooks.bsky.social

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.

New to the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, Jonathan Ulman’s marvelous snare drums reimagined. And coming soon: The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, the book! By yours truly and Thomas Patteson, from @reaktionbooks.bsky.social in 2026 imaginaryinstruments.org/snare-drums-...

And it's here! From UChicagoPress, a musical exploration of human-or-machine logic and its alternatives, from androids to so-called AI

the "graphic sound" system Oram invented for hand-drawn control of electronic sound. Oramics most likely heard at 3:56-4:50 and 5:40-6:43.

This image, from a 1615 treatise on machines by Salomon de Caus, depicts of a mechanical grotto featuring Orpheus playing a viola da gamba: Orpheus's bowing arm moves and a hydraulic organ plays from behind the scene

Jacques Vaucason's automaton flute-player (1737), modeled on a statue by Antoine Coysevox (1709); contemporaries described the statue's lifelike pose intimating the flute's "pleasant sounds," and the automaton as playing "sweet concerts" that surprise the mind while charming and delighting the heart