Bone Flute to Auto-Tune

An accessible history of music technology from the earliest days to the present.

For more than forty thousand years, humans have been using technologies simple and complex to fashion instruments for making music, the earliest surviving examples being simple bone flutes. The first book to offer a history of western music through the lens of tools, Bone Flute to Auto-Tune explores the relationship between music and technology from the Paleolithic Age to the present day. Taking an expansive view of music technology, Deirdre Loughridge develops critical perspectives on on the ways the past is built into the present, the affordances and constraints of tools, and the trade-offs made in adopting one tool rather than another. By examining music-technological transitions from across history, including the violin, piano, cymbal, electric guitar, and synthesizer, Bone Flute to Auto-Tune shows how earlier eras have been built into later technologies, influencing not only the sound of our music but also how our tools can both help and hinder us. 

The result is a music history attuned to the possibilities that new technologies open up or reveal and those they foreclose or conceal, and that considers what is gained and lost in the transition from one technology to another. By identifying turning points and trade-offs, a long historical perspective enables us to see alternate paths along which music technologies might have developed, and to grapple with our own moment in the ongoing interplay between technological change and the enduring human need for music.