#imaginaryinstrument - the voice-clock counts

Grace@gracekind.net · yesterday

Today is the day from “There Will Come Soft Rains” https://users.wpi.edu/~zrbutzke/Docs/BradburyStories(1).pdf

Sonu AI music company loses copyright lawsuit in Germany www.reuters.com/world/german...

German court rules AI music firm Suno broke copyright rules

A German ​court ruled on Friday that AI music firm Suno violated ​copyrights and has to disclose illicit revenue, part of a wider ⁠legal battle by artists and publishers against technology firms.

reuters.com

Adding this to the Music in Everyday Life reading list for fall - it’s got copyright, AI, and a very curious life behind very everyday music on the internet pitchfork.com/story/kevin-...

Kevin MacLeod, King of Royalty-Free Music

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, Kieran ...

pitchfork.com

Published by @reaktionbooks.bsky.social, The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, by Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson, catalogues “fictophones” invented across myth, literature, theory, video games and art. sonicfield.org/the-museum-o...

Bone Flute to Auto-Tune index submitted! Hopefully in the book it all makes sense

Of the many odd facets of the dinosaur skeleton economy on display with today’s auction, this surprised me most: “Gus also comes with ‘full rights,’ meaning it does not contain any copyrighted bits of other dinosaurs…” www.cnn.com/2026/07/13/s...

Out now - join us for a Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments event this summer/fall! @reaktionbooks.bsky.social @uchicagopress.bsky.social

Reviewing proofs of Bone Flute to Auto-tune, where I wrote this really not that long ago. I’m feeling notably less so confident about the present tense in “a world where writing is integral to education and knowledge production”…

Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments got reviewed in The Wire! A magazine whose pages I scoured for Sounding Human, and never imagined I’d appear in myself www.thewire.co.uk/issues/509

The Wire 509

On the cover: EarthBall : The Canadian quintet’s freeform punk aesthetic embodies the values of the close-knit Vancouver Island scene. By Emily Pothast; DoYeon Kim : The bandleader and virtuoso gaya...

thewire.co.uk

The Wire Magazine@thewiremagazine.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Wire 509 is out now! Featuring EarthBall on the cover, plus DoYeon Kim, Onilu, Jocy de Oliveira, Tomáš Šenkyřík, Eoobe, Aldana Duoraan & Tomáš Niesner, Richard Dawson’s Jukebox, and much more. Pick up your copy here: thewire.co.uk/shop/

Hello there

Well to be candible about it, this made my day

arr@arr.bsky.social · 2mo ago

english isn't for cowards. if you're not saying 'torpify,' that's a skill issue. there's no Académie Française telling you what to do. if you try to type 'pallific' and freak out when you see a little red underline, maybe you're not ready to roll with the big dogs.

Browser extension by researchers at University of Chicago to detect AI songs generated by Udio v1.5 and Suno v5 - very high accuracy thanks to consistent artifacts in their frequency spectra inaudible to humans: www.etch-humanity.org/etch-lab/qui...

Quicksilver - Browser Plugin — ETCH

Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browser extension to detect AI-generated music.

etch-humanity.org

Talking about imaginary musical instruments, as Thomas Patteson and I are wont to do. The book is out in the US July 6, and we’re available for podcasts, events, and conversations. @reaktionbooks.bsky.social @uchicagopress.bsky.social

“I am happy my kids didn’t need to learn cursive.” Shock + horror. But seriously, this is a great post about why we have to keep asking what to offload to AI and what not, both now while the technical and cultural defaults are being built and always (as I try to do with 40k years of music tech)

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I wrote a new post on what we need to keep human and what to hand over to AI, with forays into experiments in education, consulting, and the the latest controversy over literary prizes. www.oneusefulthing.org/p/choosing-t...

Finally saw Project Hail Mary, which means now I can read about the production. Great interview with the sound designers of Rocky’s voice getting into how they did it and thought about it: www.motionpictures.org/2026/03/proj...

"Project Hail Mary" Sound Designers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn on Creating Rocky's Alien Language

How sound designers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn created Rocky’s musical alien language in "Project Hail Mary."

motionpictures.org

Focusing on the theme of Agency, this year’s track asks: how agency emerges, is exercised, is negotiated, and is contested through creative practice with AI.

A few interesting things about this AI overview result for my search for _oram unpublished ms “sounds of the past”_ (1/): First sentence (“there might be a mix-up in the title”) - That’s correct, I did misremember the title. Oram’s unpublished ms is actually called “Sound of the Past” (not Sounds)

“I love music history. Unless it goes too far back and then it’s boring.” My own kid. Obviously he means anything before 40,000 years ago

Spotify’s plan for an AI cover/remix tool is understandably getting the most attention. They also plan “Reserve” so subscribers can buy tix to their favorite artist before general sale. That seems smart, thanks largely to the broader mess ticketing is in news.northeastern.edu/2026/05/18/b...

Musicians are canceling their tours. Is blue dot fever to blame?

Northeastern music industry experts discuss the claims that “blue dot fever” is causing musicians to cancel their tours.

news.northeastern.edu

In our house, “Mom music” means unmarketable music that is all of the genres and none of the genres, and takes at least a paragraph to explain what it sounds like

Wow, I love this framing for talking about technology in the age of AI! So many necessary monsters (to recall Borges)

Jill Walker Rettberg@jilltxt.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Next Friday CDN's hosting a conference on demons and AI that is going to be amazing. Rosa Martey, the organiser, is writing a book on the topic. AJ Goga, whose research involves demonology, is speaking on “Queerly embodied early modern chatbot spirits." www4.uib.no/en/research/...

quote with a fictional band that’s not Spinal Tap

Tim Carmody@tcarmody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

quote with a fictional band that's not Spinal Tap

Working through the playlist for The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments one track at a time over on Instagram. The latest was an especially fun one: the Ocarina of Time. www.instagram.com/deirdrelough/ Image from The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia featuring it and other fictophones of Hyrule

The perennial how to dress for 90 degrees and office air conditioning question

The disco ball icon arrived to my device. I’m predisposed to like disco balls but…I feel like this one communicates a lack of taste

Oh my, Grok’n Roll???

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Anton labs have hooked up a bunch of AI models to harnesses and had them working as DJs, programming and running a radio station, including taking callers and donations, which they use to buy more music. The results are both hilarious and a good reminder of how working with AI is deeply weird.

“It’s not that the prehensile hand came first…& then that allowed us to have the material culture…it’s the fact that we’re doing these amazing things that creates the selection pressure for the hand” - I find this coevolutionary logic relevant to music technology podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

The inner life of the hand

Podcast Episode · Many Minds · May 7 · 1h 10m

podcasts.apple.com

According to this 1655 source, “Letters are the plow, which create the furrows out of which all matters of the mind can spring.” Was just talking with @hilaryporiss.bsky.social &c about this kind of value to handwriting in the music classroom. These letters seem best for some wild ideas

The Public Domain Review@publicdomainrev.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Guess the letter. From a 17th-century German book on the art of writing. A great range of different styles are represented seemingly increasing in complexity, and also illegibility, as the book goes on: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-proper-art-of-writing-1655

Discussions of forecasting and speculative history with LLMs got me thinking of Ted Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” - highly recommend

My husband, at our 13yo’s request, showing him how to use a tape deck: “You are going to be so ahead of the game” 13yo: “I don’t think the game is going to revolve around tapes”