Deirdre Loughridge is a musicologist and historian of music technology whose research examines the relationship between music, technology, and human experience.
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Imagined devices such as Francis Bacon’s sound-houses and the “cat piano” reveal how speculative musical instruments have influenced music, technology, and cultural ideas about sound.
More about this author
Deirdre Loughridge is a musicologist and historian of music technology at Northeastern University. Her research explores the relationship between music, technology, science, and human experience, with a particular focus on how musical instruments, machines, and media have shaped ideas about music and humanity. She is the author of Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism and Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020, and co-author of The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments. Her work examines topics ranging from historical musical technologies and automata to contemporary questions surrounding artificial intelligence, sound, and musical meaning. Find her online at deirdreloughridge.com.
Publications by this author
Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism
University of Chicago Press | September | 2016
The years between roughly 1760 and 1810, a period stretching from the rise of Joseph Haydn’s career to the height of Ludwig van Beethoven’s, are often viewed as a golden age for musical culture, when audiences started to revel in the sounds of the concert hall. But the latter half of the eighteenth century also saw proliferating optical technologies—including magnifying instruments, magic lanterns, peepshows, and shadow-plays—that offered new performance tools, fostered musical innovation, and shaped the very idea of “pure” music. Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow is a fascinating exploration of the early romantic blending of sight and sound as encountered in popular science, street entertainments, opera, and music criticism.
Deirdre Loughridge reveals that allusions in musical writings to optical technologies reflect their spread from fairgrounds and laboratories into public consciousness and a range of discourses, including that of music. She demonstrates how concrete points of intersection—composers’ treatments of telescopes and peepshows in opera, for instance, or a shadow-play performance of a ballad—could then fuel new modes of listening that aimed to extend the senses. An illuminating look at romantic musical practices and aesthetics, this book yields surprising relations between the past and present and offers insight into our own contemporary audiovisual culture.
Imagined instruments reveal how we shape music—and how music shapes us.
The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments is a guided tour through centuries of instruments that never existed. From ancient myths to futuristic media, these imagined devices appear in literature, theory, video games, and art, at times echoing real instruments, other times pushing far beyond the bounds of technology. This book presents a wide-ranging collection of such creations, showing how they reflect changing ideas about sound, invention, and the limits of the possible. At once a cultural history and a study of creative thought, it uncovers unexpected links between music, design, and the human urge to make meaning through sound. These are not just fictional artifacts; they are windows into what music might mean, even when it cannot be played.