About the book

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.