An expansive analysis of the relationship between human and machine in music. From the mid-eighteenth century on, there was a logic at work in musical discourse and practice: human or machine. That discourse defined a boundary of absolute difference between human and machine, with a recurrent practice of parsing "human" musicality from its "merely mechanical" simulations. In Sounding Human, Deirdre Loughridge tests and traverses these boundaries, unmaking the "human or machine" logic and seeking out others, better characterized by conjunctions such as and or with. Sounding Human enters the debate on posthumanism and human-machine relationships in music, exploring how categories of human and machine have been continually renegotiated over the centuries. Loughridge expertly traces this debate from the 1737 invention of what became the first musical android to the creation of a "sound wave instrument" by a British electronic music composer in the 1960s, and the chopped and pitched vocals produced by sampling singers' voices in modern pop music. From music-generating computer programs to older musical instruments and music notation, Sounding Human shows how machines have always actively shaped the act of music composition. In doing so, Loughridge reveals how musical artifacts have been--or can be--used to help explain and contest what it is to be human.

The Auditory System and Human Sound-Localization Behavior provides a comprehensive account of the full action-perception cycle underlying spatial hearing. It highlights the interesting properties of the auditory system, such as its organization in azimuth and elevation coordinates. Readers will appreciate that sound localization is inherently a neuro-computational process (it needs to process on implicit and independent acoustic cues). The localization problem of which sound location gave rise to a particular sensory acoustic input cannot be uniquely solved, and therefore requires some clever strategies to cope with everyday situations. The reader is guided through the full interdisciplinary repertoire of the natural sciences: not only neurobiology, but also physics and mathematics, and current theories on sensorimotor integration (e.g. Bayesian approaches to deal with uncertain information) and neural encoding.

This book describes how human hearing works and how to build machines that analyze sounds in the same way that people do.