I’m a historian of music and technology, exploring what our musical tools reveal about us.

From eighteenth-century inventors building instrument-playing androids to today’s musicians experimenting with AI, we’ve been using music technology to ask what makes us human. In my latest book, Sounding Human (University of Chicago Press, 2023), I explore how musical machines have shaped—and been shaped by—efforts to demonstrate, redefine, and understand humanness.

This spring, Thomas Patteson and I are publishing The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (Reaktion/Chicago, 2026), featuring speculative instruments from our digital museum. These are the instruments that never quite were, from historical thought experiments to contemporary dreams of what music-making could become.

My next book, Bone Flute to Auto-Tune (Chicago, fall 2026), takes readers on a 40,000-year journey through music technology, examining the tools we’ve used to make, record, and transform sound. What did we gain with each innovation? What did we trade away? And how do the choices of past generations echo in today’s technologies?

As a musicologist at Northeastern University, I work at the intersection of music history, science and technology studies, and sound studies. I’ve also co-edited The Science-Music Borderlands (MIT Press, 2023) with Elizabeth Margulis and Psyche Loui, bringing together humanities scholars and scientists to rethink how we understand music.

When I’m not researching historical musical technologies, I play them. I’m a cellist (and occasional flutist) with The Wiggly Tendrils, a chamber pop band that sometimes sounds like the Star Wars cantina landed at your local farmer’s market.