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.

Over forty thousand years ago, humans fashioned flutes from bone. The first book to offer a history of Western music through the lens of tools, Bone Flute to Auto-tune explores the relationship between music and technology from the Paleolithic Age to the present day. By examining music-technological transitions from across history, including the violin, piano, saxophone, electric guitar and synthesizer, Bone Flute to Auto-tune thinks through how and why certain changes have taken place and shows how earlier eras have been built into later technologies. The result is a music history attuned to the possibilities that new technologies open up or reveal and those they foreclose or conceal, and that considers what was gained and what lost in the transition from one technology to another. By identifying turning points and trade-offs, a long historical perspective enables us to see alternate paths along which music technologies might have developed – and to recognize that we are living through another such moment of transition now.

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I’m a historian of music and technology, exploring what our musical tools reveal about us and what history can offer as we navigate our present and future.

My work is driven by a conviction that music history can do more than look backward. It can inform how we design and think about music technology, enrich musical experiences, and deepen our understanding of ourselves as musical beings. Increasingly pressing to me are questions of how to make and find meaning in the age of generative AI, and what we’re doing to ourselves and our society with these tools.

From eighteenth-century inventors building instrument-playing androids to today’s musicians experimenting with AI, we’ve been using music technology to ask what makes us human. In my book Sounding Human (University of Chicago Press, 2023), I explore how musical machines have shaped—and been shaped by—efforts to demonstrate, redefine, and understand humanness.

As a musicologist at Northeastern University, I work at the intersection of music history, science and technology studies, and sound studies. I’ve also co-edited The Science-Music Borderlands (MIT Press, 2023) with Elizabeth Margulis and Psyche Loui, bringing together humanities scholars and scientists to rethink how we understand music.

When I’m not researching historical musical technologies, I play them. I’m a cellist (and occasional flutist) with The Wiggly Tendrils, a chamber pop band that sometimes sounds like the Star Wars cantina landed at your local farmer’s market.