Deirdre Loughridge - "The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments" - Jennifer Iverson

Deirdre Loughridge will discuss The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments. She will be joined in conversation by Jennifer Iverson. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. About the book: The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments is a guided tour of fictional, fantastical, and speculative musical instruments. From a trumpet that stretches to infinity to devices that extract songs from the brain, the book presents a curated collection of imaginary instruments spanning ancient myth, Renaissance theory, science fiction, visual art, and film. Through a new taxonomical scheme, it illuminates how the imagination operates with the stuff of sound and technology, and how its expressions are historically conditioned. About the authors: Deirdre Loughridge is Professor of Music at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020 and her next book, Bone Flute to Auto-Tune: Forty Thousand Years of Music Technology, is forthcoming from UChicago Press in November 2026. Thomas Patteson is a writer, teacher and musician based in Philadelphia. He is the author of Instruments for New Music (University of California Press) and is currently translating Die Improvisation in der Musik, Ernst Ferand’s groundbreaking history of improvisational practice in European music. About the interlocutor: Jennifer Iverson is Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, and author of Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Avant-Garde (Oxford, 2019).