| Abstract |
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 this book, the author tests and traverses these boundaries, unmaking the "human or machine" logic and seeking out others, better characterized by conjunctions such as and or with. This book 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. The author 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, this book shows how machines have always actively shaped the act of music composition. In doing so, the author reveals how musical artifacts have been-or can be-used to help explain and contest what it is to be human. |
