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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.