Alum Deirdre Loughridge Co-Authors New Book

Alum Deirdre Loughridge, née Kelly, co-authored the recently released book The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (University of Chicago Press), a guided tour through centuries of instruments that never existed. The book, written alongside Thomas Patteson, was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Loughridge received a double bachelor's in music and biology (with a specialization in neuroscience) from the University of Chicago in 2004. During her time on campus, she played cello in the University Symphony Orchestra, New Music Ensemble, and Chamber Music Program. Of her time at UChicago, Loughridge says, "I declared a music major to get more access to the practice rooms, while continuing to study biology and explore other subjects. Little did I realize, I was signing up to have my musical world thrown open and find my path in music research."

The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments can be purchased through University of Chicago Press. On November 13 at 4pm, Deirdre Loughridge will present an author talk at the Seminary Co-op in conversation with UChicago Associate Professor Jennifer Iverson.

Learn more about the book below.

About The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments

The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments is a guided tour through centuries of instruments that never existed. These imagined devices appear in ancient myth, literature, theory, video games, and art, at times echoing real instruments, other times pushing far beyond the bounds of technology. From a trumpet that stretches to infinity to devices that extract songs from the brain, the book presents a wide-ranging collection of such creations. “Fictophones,” as the authors call this hitherto unrecognized category of instruments, reveal the permeable boundary between what can be thought and what can be made. At once a cultural history and a study of creative thought, the book traces persistent structures and shifts in imaginative invention, and speaks to what music might mean even when it cannot be played.

 

About Deirdre Loughridge

Deirdre Loughridge is a musicologist and Professor of Music at Northeastern University in Boston. Her research centers on the history of music and technology, and engages with the history of science and media studies to illuminate music from material and multisensory perspectives. She is the author of Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020 (University of Chicago Press, 2023), and co-editor of The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future (MIT Press, 2023). She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her next book, Bone Flute to Auto-Tune: Forty Thousand Years of Music Technology, is based on a course she developed over a decade of teaching, and is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in December 2026.