The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI

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Wide-ranging, thought-provoking music history... Hajdu is at heart a humanist.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

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Authoritative... Hajdu is well positioned to ponder the philosophical stakes of algorithm-driven art.--Evelyn McDonnell "The American Scholar"

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Compelling. . . . An eclectic yet rigorous gathering.--Aaron Peck "Times Literary Supplement"

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David Hajdu is the rare sort of critic whose deep intelligence and even deeper humanity can challenge or rearrange even the most deeply held positions about culture. I thought I knew how I felt about AI. . . . The Uncanny Muse made me rethink all of it. A miraculous book, written with extraordinary grace.--Amanda Petrusich, author of Do Not Sell at Any Price and pop music critic, The New Yorker

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As AI flirts with aesthetics, the questions may change, but the riddles just get gnarly: Can 'smart' machines sound sexy? Do robots make art for other robots? What blind spots form when composers play duets with algorithms? Tracing how mechanics has long tinkered with our imaginations, from clocks and cameras to Steinways, player pianos, microphones, Moogs, and beyond, Hajdu's tantalizingly brief book coasts on that Elvis quote, 'Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.' A thought bomb on every page.--Tim Riley, author of Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music--The Definitive Life and pop and classical music critic, NPR

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Fabulous and stimulating. We humans have always had a deep fascination with mechanical objects and an equally deep urge to create art. David Hajdu skillfully brings these two strands together in a work of elegant synthesis, revealing a deep understanding of what makes us and our machines tick and our art sing.--Daniel J. Levitin, New York Times best-selling author of This Is Your Brain on Music and I Heard There Was a Secret Chord

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Into a moment when AI's troubling role in the present and future of artistic creation rules the discourse, David Hajdu's The Uncanny Muse brings an exciting and essential sense of history, perspective, and boundless curiosity. This constantly surprising exploration of 150 years of boundary-pushing and limit-testing innovations in the realm of who, or what, can make art reframes the discussion in a vital and fascinating way.--Mark Harris, New York Times best-selling author of Mike Nichols: A Life

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Fascinating. The result of David Hajdu's extensive research, interviews, and expert journalism is a cornucopia of ideas involving art, music, machines, computers, and AI, excitingly interspersed with personal interviews of many of the key innovators still living. Curiosity and creativity combine in this fine accomplishment.--A. Michael Noll, pioneer in the use of digital computers in the visual arts and professor emeritus, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, USC

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David Hajdu, one of our most important arts and cultural critics, confronts one of the most divisive aesthetic issues facing us today. In The Uncanny Muse, Hajdu interviews jazz and rock musicians, visits museums and laboratories, goes to nightclubs, galleries, and a Christie's auction to hear and evaluate the work of artists who either resist or embrace mechanical arts, finding them authentic or fraudulent, innovative or derivative, liberating or dehumanizing. What, in the end, Hajdu forces us to ask ourselves, does it mean to sound human?--Robert P. Crease, chair, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, and author of The Workshop and the World: What Ten Thinkers Can Teach Us About Science and Authority

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David Hajdu has tapped into something vital. This very engaging book places art and music at the center of our long history of collaboration with machines, reaffirming the importance of situating the human spirit at the center of today's artificial intelligence efforts.--George E. Lewis, innovator in AI composition and Edwin H. Case Professor of Music, Columbia University

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I like to say that music lives at the intersection of the algorithmic and the spiritual. In The Uncanny Muse, David Hajdu explores the meeting point of these seemingly opposing forces, in music as well as in visual art, with uncommon lucidity and depth. In language both precise and effortlessly flowing, he leads us on a fast-paced journey through the events which, over the last 150 years, have led us to our AI-dominated present, from early experiments in robotics to mechanized House music via the first attempts at generative art. Through it all, he shows an unerring curiosity for and command of his subject.--Dan Tepfer, pianist / composer / coder

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The Uncanny Muse offers a timely, richly informative, and beautifully written inquiry into the origins of 'computational creativity, ' framed in the historical context of human creativity and our many mechanical muses.--John Seabrook, author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory

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This analytical, historical review should interest readers of pop culture analysis... [Hajdu] asserts that technology has long assisted inventiveness.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr. "Library Journal"

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Lucid and instructive... A lively survey of centuries of machines that have served as instruments of cultural change.--Wendy Smith "Washington Post"

Brief Description:
An acclaimed critic, journalist, and songwriter-musician tells the story of art's relation to machines, from the Baroque period to the age of AI.

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[Hajdu's] whirlwind tour through nearly 150 years of cultural history is both pacy and brimming with detail.--Nadia Beard "Financial Times"

Publisher Marketing:

What does it mean to be human in a world where machines, too, can be artists? The Uncanny Muse explores the history of automation in the arts and delves into one of the most momentous and controversial aspects of AI: artificial creativity. The adoption of technology and machinery has long transformed the world, but as the potential for artificial intelligence expands, David Hajdu examines the new, increasingly urgent questions about technology's role in culture.

From the life-size mechanical doll that made headlines in Victorian London to the doll's modern AI-pop star counterpart, Hajdu traces the fascinating, varied ways in which inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes and mechanize creative production. For decades, machines and artists have engaged in expressing the human condition--along with the condition of living with machines--through player pianos, broadcasting technology, electric organs, digital movie effects, synthesizers, and motion capture. By communicating and informing human knowledge, the machines have exerted considerable influence on the history of art--and often more influence than humans have been willing to recognize. As Hajdu proclaims: "before machine learning, there was machine teaching."

With thoughtful, wide-ranging, and surprising turns from Berry Gordy and George Harrison to Andy Warhol and Stevie Wonder, David Hajdu takes a novel and contrarian approach: he sees how machines through the ages have enabled creativity, not stifled it--and The Uncanny Muse sees no reason why this shouldn't be the case with AI today.

Review Citations:

• Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2025 (EAN 9780393540833, Hardcover)
• Library Journal 02/01/2025 pg. 70 (EAN 9780393540833, Hardcover)
• Publishers Weekly 02/03/2025 (EAN 9780393540833, Hardcover)
• Booklist 02/25/2025 (EAN 9780393540833, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:Hajdu, David
David Hajdu is the author of seven books, including Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction, and a three-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A musician and composer, he is the music critic for the Nation and a journalism professor at Columbia University. He lives in New York City.