Date: December 7
Time: 7–8pm Eastern
Admission: FREE - Participants must RSVP through this page.
This event is scheduled to be hosted on Zoom. Participants will receive the event link via email on the morning of the event day. Should you encounter any issues accessing the link, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at info@arcane17.co for assistance. Additionally, we are pleased to inform our Members that a recording of this event will be available on our Patreon page.
Join authors Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson for a guided tour of their new book, The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments. From ancient myths to futuristic media, these imagined devices appear in literature, theory, video games, and art, at times echoing real instruments, other times pushing far beyond the bounds of existing technologies. Across centuries and sources, Loughridge and Patteson find these fictional, fantastical and speculative instruments expressing eight major orientations: cosmic, analogical, extended, comic, historical, living, mind, and computational. The study of “fictophones” provides a way into the structure of the imagination itself, revealing both its persistent forms and its historically shifting expressions. Not simply proto-real objects, nor mere curiosities, imaginary instruments are vehicles for exploring the permeable boundary between the actual and the possible.
Deirdre Loughridge is a professor of music at Northeastern University and musicologist specializing in the history of music and technology. Her scholarship draws on the history of science and media studies to illuminate music from material and multisensory perspectives. She is also a cellist in the chamber pop band The Wiggly Tendrils.
Thomas Patteson is a writer, teacher and musician based in Philadelphia, and a Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. His research as a musicologist encompasses sound technology, improvisation, and consciousness studies. As a musician, Thomas plays and organizes concerts and other events for People’s Music Supply, a group he co-founded in 2023.
Images (from the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments):
Book Cover (University of Chicago Press)
Jean Delville, “The Death of Orpheus” (1893)
Cat Piano from La Nature, Vol. 11 (1883)
Foundation and Empire 1986 Ballantine edition book cover art by Michael Whelan
Date: December 7
Time: 7–8pm Eastern
Admission: FREE - Participants must RSVP through this page.
This event is scheduled to be hosted on Zoom. Participants will receive the event link via email on the morning of the event day. Should you encounter any issues accessing the link, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at info@arcane17.co for assistance. Additionally, we are pleased to inform our Members that a recording of this event will be available on our Patreon page.
Join authors Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson for a guided tour of their new book, The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments. From ancient myths to futuristic media, these imagined devices appear in literature, theory, video games, and art, at times echoing real instruments, other times pushing far beyond the bounds of existing technologies. Across centuries and sources, Loughridge and Patteson find these fictional, fantastical and speculative instruments expressing eight major orientations: cosmic, analogical, extended, comic, historical, living, mind, and computational. The study of “fictophones” provides a way into the structure of the imagination itself, revealing both its persistent forms and its historically shifting expressions. Not simply proto-real objects, nor mere curiosities, imaginary instruments are vehicles for exploring the permeable boundary between the actual and the possible.
Deirdre Loughridge is a professor of music at Northeastern University and musicologist specializing in the history of music and technology. Her scholarship draws on the history of science and media studies to illuminate music from material and multisensory perspectives. She is also a cellist in the chamber pop band The Wiggly Tendrils.
Thomas Patteson is a writer, teacher and musician based in Philadelphia, and a Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. His research as a musicologist encompasses sound technology, improvisation, and consciousness studies. As a musician, Thomas plays and organizes concerts and other events for People’s Music Supply, a group he co-founded in 2023.
Images (from the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments):
Book Cover (University of Chicago Press)
Jean Delville, “The Death of Orpheus” (1893)
Cat Piano from La Nature, Vol. 11 (1883)
Foundation and Empire 1986 Ballantine edition book cover art by Michael Whelan
