Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments

Deirdre Loughridge (Author) Deirdre Loughridge is Professor of Music at Northeastern University, Boston. Her previous books include Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020 (2023).Thomas Patteson (Author) Thomas Patteson is a teacher, writer and musician based in Philadelphia. He is the author of Instruments for New Music (2016), lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of People’s Music Supply.

[A] lavishly illustrated survey . . . The fanciful bordering on delusional nature of so many of the instruments described by Loughridge and Patteson may lead one to dismiss the lot of them as an assortment of crackpot schemes decisively roped off from the world of hard reality . . . You can't have progress without the occasional prank or embarrassing misstep. - Dave Mandl, The WireLoughridge and musician Patteson present a social and cultural voyage through sonic space, showcasing fanciful devices . . . Well-illustrated . . . and evocative. - Library JournalEqual to the descriptions and analyses of so many fictophones are the illustrations of preposterous devices throughout this lavish and pleasing book, not least the cover on which a figure plays the beams of light as they fall through a forest in Remedios Varo’s 1955 painting Música Solar. Despite the richness of content, it is neat and light to handle, colourful, accessible and entertaining. The authors close by expressing their ‘joy and wonder,’ which has been brilliantly communicated throughout. - LeonardoWhat an Arkestra, what a trip! Visiting (and revisiting) Loughridge and Patteson’s The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments immerses you in the sonic, visual and philosophical delights of “fictophones” from across space, time and astral planes. This slim encyclopedia is brilliant, hilarious and erudite – an ultra-evocative and hyper-resonant sextant for an age of sublime and demented machines. - John Tresch, Professor of History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute, University of LondonHugely enjoyable and endlessly stimulating, The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments takes readers on a captivating journey through centuries of musical invention, both real and imagined. Every page is infused with deep scholarship and a palpable sense of wonder – a true celebration of music’s limitless possibilities. - Alexander Rehding, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard UniversityMusical instruments exemplify the development of highly specialised and elaborate technologies, designed for mutual compatibility in collaborative contexts. In this fascinating book, Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson uncover a quite different strata of invention in which speculative, impossible and deeply strange instruments live and function within the imagination. They demonstrate conclusively that, despite the dazzling range of existent instruments, there is in human culture an appetite for musical forms that cannot be heard. - David Toop, musician, writer and Emeritus ProfessorThe Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments makes tangible – and page-by-page, more fantastical and curious – the elusive question of what music is, and what we wish it could be. - Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, Professor and Director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University