iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

NYC: next Wednesday, come to our book talk on The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments at The New School. Tell your friends who like strange sounds and impossible things. RSVP here: event.newschool.edu/imaginarymusic

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Now collecting imaginary music. This “hyperaccelerated polyphony” is from Ted Chiang’s “Understand” (an excellent story that did not take the turn I was thinking it would)

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Reposted by Deirdre Loughridge

alex roberts @lexlanham.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

a euphonium that pours beer, a 13-bell trumpet, an ocular harpsichord that emits colored lights, & a piano that makes music by forcing cats to meow? my CAMD colleague @deirdrelough.bsky.social wrote a ridiculously cool book on imaginary & imagined instruments news.northeastern.edu/2026/07/06/i...

news.northeastern.edu

A piano that makes music with cats? Book explores imagined devices

Imaginary musical instruments, from a cat piano to a beer-pouring horn, get their history told in a new book by a Northeastern professor.

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Just read Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, after seeing someone compare it to Amazon’s book destruction for AI training data operation uncovered by @404media.co. It’s so funny, and so frightening in all the right ways for our time. Also, an unexpected sighting of Gabriel’s Horn

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Reposted by Deirdre Loughridge

Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Boston-area friends: tell your students, we’re hackathoning imaginary musical instruments!

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Boston-area friends: tell your students, we’re hackathoning imaginary musical instruments!

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Apparently in my excitement I misspelled Journal

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Gift link to a review of The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments in today’s Wall Street Jorunal! Spoiler alert: it finds in the book’s “treasures…the ‘enduring fascination’ of the possible, no less important for being imaginary.” @reaktionbooks.bsky.social www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

wsj.com

‘The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments’ Review: The Sound of Whimsy

In 1922 Joseph H. Kraus proposed a “smell organ.” A middle C would smell like a rose; bass notes like clove and vanilla.

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Likewise, glad we realized- and thank you!

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Oh my gosh I’m late to this - wonderful!!!

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Reposted by Deirdre Loughridge

Sonic Field @sonicfield.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

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...

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

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

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

“In most museums that have a T. rex, what you actually see is a casting of Stan... The team who excavated this dinosaur has excavated other T. rex, and they have made their own scans and molds of everything, so they were able to make Gus completely free of Stan”

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

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...

cnn.com

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

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

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

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”…

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

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

thewire.co.uk

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...

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Oh my goodness I saw this book was coming out and did not intuit that meaning of reverse centaur. I thought it was like, centaur represents coupling/hybrid and reverse centaur is uncoupling. Thank you for this and I look forward to @doctorow.pluralistic.net’s book

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Well to be candible about it, this made my day

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Especially after an exploding meteor (which I’m bummed I somehow missed yesterday)

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

I love the exclamation mark. Because of course anyone can be a fish!

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

This method also makes detection readily defeatable. But I’m fascinated there is this presence in the frequency spectra that human ears (ostensibly) can’t hear

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

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...

etch-humanity.org

Quicksilver - Browser Plugin — ETCH

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

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

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

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

“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)

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

“we purposely stayed away from all electronic sounds. But what we found is that some of the most organic sounds, for instance, bird calls, can feel electronic. We’d be reviewing a scene, and Phil [Lord] would say, ‘That sounds too electronic,’ and we’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s just a whippoorwill.’”

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

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...

motionpictures.org

"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."

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Reposted by Deirdre Loughridge

NeurIPS Conference @neuripsconf.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

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.

neurips.cc

Call For Creative AI 2026

Title: NeurIPS Creative AI Track 2026: Agency

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

It feels a little like stumbling upon something in the library stacks, an experience many of us worry about losing to the detriment of knowledge. It also raises critical questions about how that space for serendipitous discovery gets filled.

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

3rd-4th sentences - Serendipitous discovery. I didn’t know about Zaira Oram and though it’s not what I was looking for with this search I am glad it came up...

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

(Oram and Derbyshire are not the same person! They are two different electronic composers with very different careers and works, though the most frequently noted thing about both is that they worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and were women).

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Second sentence - illustrates what @leahbroad.bsky.social has shown about the LLM accuracy gap for less widely researched topics: Delia Derbyshire is swapped in for [Daphne] Oram as if they’re same person. See Broad’s essay here: open.substack.com/pub/leahbroa...

open.substack.com

Why we should care about ChatGPT's accuracy gap

I tested ChatGPT on my area of expertise. The results are a problem for future knowledge

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

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)

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Fortunately it’s a short list in that category

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

“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

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

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...

news.northeastern.edu

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.

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

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

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

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

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

quote with a fictional band that’s not Spinal Tap

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

I first thought “letting it decide how to text a situationship” was a meta-level flip into the gibberish such reliance risks producing, so describing production of text by LLMs in general. Turns out situationship is a word, so text just means text message.

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

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

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

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

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Deirdre Loughridge @deirdrelough.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

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

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