On the necessity of music to imagine cosmic silence.

From Margret Grebowicz, Whale Song (a Bloomsbury Object Lessons book)

As intimated by the illustration of a singing statue seen here, plants provide the sonic core of this peculiar music technology.

Ballard’s Singing Statues are now on display in the Museum, imaginaryinstruments.org/singing-stat...

J. G. Ballard had an acute sensitivity to sound and its speculative possibilities. In his stories, sound is no mere fleeting vibration. It accumulates on surfaces, it emanates from flowers, it reflects its listener like a mirror.

I think Ben Lerner may have totally described LLMs in 10:04 (2014): “…we can think of them as bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world…”

“This is my music - this is myself.” One of many phrases humorously, visually literalized ⬇️

He Wrote a Book About Interviewing. Here’s His Interview. In an interview with Andrew Marantz, the novelist and poet Ben Lerner discusses how smartphones “charge the air around us,” what fiction can record that a transcript can’t, and why the book is also a ...

…whenever something threatens to obsolesce—and we’re in a moment where everything seems to be threatening to obsolesce—that is also an opportunity to refresh the value you take in the specific medium.” www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

“every time there’s this radical extension of the ability to capture or reproduce the voice, or the image, etc, it creates an interesting counterpressure on the arts it supposedly renders obsolete…1/2

Congrats! There’s a punk rock song in that title

Had to be time travel

O frabjous day for readers in the UK

😮 I need an anthropology of this video

The epigraph to The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, out April 13 in the UK

Dragon from Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus (1665)

“We do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to the human imagination… It is, one might say, a necessary monster.” -Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

My 11yo did a cover concept for Bone Flute to Auto-tune. I love it. Sorry to disappoint, there are no dinosaurs in the book

The reality is no less wondrous.

Safe return journey, Artemis II.

Photo from: nasa.gov/gallery/lunar-flyby

According to a radio play by Walter Benjamin (yes that one), the moon has a committee for Earth research. Their instruments are a spectrophone through which to see & hear everything on Earth; a parlamonium which translates human speech into music; and an oneiroscope for observing earthlings’ dreams.

What can AI teach us about the mind? Podcast Episode · Many Minds · March 26 · 1h 21m

“what you end up learning by getting really good at predicting the next word is a separate question. And it's an empirical question that is hard to answer with just a priori speculation about what is or isn't possible to learn in that way.”

Episode of Many Minds podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments has been collecting instruments like this since 2013. Happy April 1. Our book, with Thomas Patteson, is out April 13 in the UK from @reaktionbooks.bsky.social, July in the US from @uchicagopress.bsky.social

It was a joke. Seventeen years later, companies like Suno are making the same promise in earnest. But “the only limit is your imagination” has always promised more than is technologically possible. Brain interfaces and AI are instruments too, with their own affordances and constraints.

In 2009, Antares Audio Technologies (makers of AutoTune) announced Direct Mind Access: technology to transfer the music in your head directly to a DAW. No practice, no skill required. “The only limit is your imagination!” would, for the first time, actually be true.

#Conversations_to_remember
11yo: Did the [40,000 year old] bone flute work?
Me: Yes
11yo: What was the earliest musical instrument that didn’t work?

Reality, reimagined Northeastern professor of music Deirdre Loughridge uses doctoral student Nathan Miner’s VR art installation on CAMD day on Tuesday, March 17, 2026. The hyper field extended reality art installation is...

Well that was fun 🥽 news.northeastern.edu/2026/03/17/r...

Humpback Song with Sperm Whale Clicks YouTube video by Ocean Networks Canada

Ie how does this cooperation relate to vocalization, which in sperm whales sounds like patterned clicks vs humpback whale songs? m.youtube.com/watch?v=LceJ...

Whales display behavior typically seen in humans, new research shows Scientists captured the first detailed footage of a sperm whale birth and found it was not just a family affair.

New evidence that sperm whale birth is miraculous, its cross-kin cooperation “raising questions about the cognitive architectures and communication systems that support and mediate these behaviors” news.northeastern.edu/2026/03/26/s...

Oh my goodness, Fu-wah ❤️! As long as the tofu and toppings haven’t changed, those were the best

The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments | Reaktion Books 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, t...

Find Russolo’s intonarumori and other fictophones in our forthcoming book, out in April in the UK @reaktionbooks.bsky.social, July in the US @uchicagopress.bsky.social : reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/the-mus...

Chapter 5 of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments is about historical fictophones: instruments that traverse time strangely, known more as idea than object. Russolo sits at a telling edge: his instruments were real enough to perform, and lost enough to become imaginary.

A few were built. All were destroyed. What survives are patent drawings, studio photographs, graphic scores — and a history that has been as much confabulated as documented.

In 1913, Luigi Russolo declared that the future of music was noise. Then he patented the instruments to make it: the intonarumori, noise-intoners he designed for a futurist orchestra.

Oldest evidence of domestic dogs discovered in Europe and Türkiye | Natural History Museum Bones unearthed at several sites show that dogs were widely distributed across West Eurasia by at least 14,000 years ago.

Newly discovered jaw bone pushes earliest genetic evidence for domestic dogs back to 15,000 years ago (reminder: earliest known musical instrument is from about 40,000 years ago) www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...