Posthuman Music Machines: Literature in the Age of the Pianola

Postdoctoral researcher: Ruth Alison Clemens

The historical rise of the pianola or player-piano revolutionised automatic music. Originally marketed to a growing affluent class in the early 20th century as a commercial entertainment technology, the pianola’s proto-computational musical programming led to musical compositions that were difficult or even impossible for human players, establishing it as a posthuman music machine.

This project studies how Anglo-American literature from the age of the pianola (1896-1929) engages with the posthuman, non/human, or more-than-human: modernist experiments with form and consciousness; futurist interest in (or anxiety for) automation and mechanisation; and the overlap with the genre of science fiction by imagining speculative futures through pianola technology. Literary engagements with programmed sound blur the line between human and machine, creativity and reproduction, original and copy. This connects to contemporary debates around the impact of creative AI and offers an important – but lost – cultural stepping stone in the history of encoded, mechanised, synthesized music.

Michael Thomas Rowland, new team member

A sub-project of Tracing Players Playing Traces is to inventory the different ways in which literary texts employ music creation and performance (including, for example, the use of musical sound as a metaphor and the contrast between music and silence). 

Assistant researcher Michael Thomas Rowland has joined the project to further this goal starting with documenting the intersections between and uses of non/human music and sound in speculative literature. Rowland has a background in critically employing speculative fiction, traditional archival history and philosophy in the field of Early Modern Dutch colonial history with a focus on the animal, ecocide and elite/underclass narratives that control/liberate populations. Alongside research on narratives, Rowland runs a music project k.cast  that combines fiction, curated songs and custom made soundscapes. Working as both a contributor and team member of the Rotterdam-based Operator Radio station, he aims to produce accessible research developed and applied through praxis.

Listening to Possible Worlds: Music and the Posthuman in Literature and Culture

22-23 October 2026, Leiden University, the Netherlands (in-person) 

Confirmed keynote speakers are Anna Snaith (King’s College London) and Chris Tonelli (University of Groningen) 

In her 1999 essay “Quantum Listening,” musicologist Pauline Oliveros called for new and speculative modes of listening that are not only attentive to but also active in the creation of possible future worlds. For Oliveros, this practice entails “listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously – changing and being changed by the listening.” The conceptualisation of listening as a speculative practice of shaping possible cultures yet-to-come is especially relevant in the current era of rapidly emerging technologies of structural creation, embodiment, and mediatisation. Indeed, a quarter of a century later, her reference to “accelerated artificial evolution – hybrid humans – new beings born of technology” who bring with them “new challenges, consequences, dangers, freedoms and responsibilities” seems even more apt.  

Despite an extensive presence in speculative fiction, both at the level of representation and as practice or methodology, the role of sound, music, and listening has received limited attention in scholarship on speculative literature and culture. Nevertheless, examples abound in the Anglophone world alone, from the use of music or recording technologies in literature, such as the phonograph in Bernard Capes’ story “The Devil's Fantasia” (1902), the stones in the for-TV horror play The Stone Tape (1972), or the Orchestra in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Memory of Whiteness (1985), to the use of music as a mode of speculative worldbuilding in the pseudo-anthropological soundtrack of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985), as a practice of decolonial cosmology in Journey to Nabta Playa by Angel Bat Dawid and Naima Nefertari (2025), and as a transmedial project of speculative research-creation in the approach of Black Quantum Futurism (2015-present). Sound and music are biopolitical; from underscoring technological modes of extraction and war in historical modernist fiction to shaping identities around gender in video games. Sound and music are at once ephemeral and otherworldly yet also intensely linked to technological modes of mediation, and this is especially apt in the recent emergence of GenAI technologies that offer new forms of sonic capture and subversion. At the same time, aural forms such as storytelling and song have the potential to circumvent the dominance of visual language and the written word and, with them, the normative ideas, worlds, and epistemologies they reinforce. How does speculative literature respond to or incorporate the aural, sonic, or noisy? How are sonic technologies co-opted into practices of worldbuilding? How does the speculative mode of artistic and literary enquiry generate new possibilities of listening? 

This conference calls for presentations on sound and music in speculative literature and culture. We invite studies of sound across forms, media, genres, and contexts, taking a broad approach to both the “speculative” and to “fiction.” This includes literary texts but also games, broadcast media, digital culture, music, television, and film, and is not limited to the genres of science fiction or the fantastic but to works of art that ask, what if? 

Topics of interest may include but are not limited to: 
•    Sound, music, and futurity  
•    Music and speculative technologies, including generative AI 
•    Sonic technologies in fiction 
•    Acousmatics and the hearing sciences in fiction
•    Listening as a speculative mode of ex/post/de-coloniality 
•    The sounds and music of war 
•    Music and the posthuman, more-than-human, and non/human 
•    Utopian and dystopian soundworlds 
•    Listening and/as ecology in SF 
•    Disability and embodiment in SF 
•    Experimental speculative fiction, sound art, and the avant-garde 
•    The weird, the eerie, and the cosmic 
•    Noise and/or silence in SF 
•    Sonic worldbuilding across media 
•    Gender, sexuality, and sound in SF 
•    Genre and adaptation between sound and fiction 
•    Science fiction, fantasy, YA, and popular fiction 
•    Race, caste, class and music in SF 
•    The relationship between sound/music and speculative isms or aesthetic modes such as Dadaism, Afrofuturism, Cyberpunk etc.  
•    The relationship between sound/music, digital culture, and internet aesthetics 
•    The politics of language, translation, and sound in SF 

There are two tiers for registration fees: €50 for waged and/or funded participants and €25 for unwaged and/or unfunded participants. There are a limited number of bursaries available for people without access to regular funding, consisting of €100 towards expenses and a conference fee waiver. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please indicate this on the proposal.

We invite presenters to submit an abstract of 250 words and a bio of 100 words for a 20-minute paper or alternative presentation format (performative, creative-critical, collaborative). Please send abstracts and bios in one document to Ruth Alison Clemens at r.a.clemens@hum.leidenuniv.nl with the subject heading ‘LTPW Proposal’. We will notify participants by the end of April 2026. 

Deadline for submissions: Monday 30 March 2026 

At the Pianola Museum in collaboration with artistic researcher Sandipan Nath. More information to follow soon.

Talks, presentations, and workshops

• R. A. Clemens, Workshop on Piano rolls Special Collections, Library of City College, New York
• R. A. Clemens, MSA
• R. A. Clemens, ‘The Sonic War Machine.’ Invited talk and artists’ roundtable on ‘Hidden Histories,’ Emerson Contemporary. Part of the UnMonument initiative, Emerson College, Boston, and City of Boston, MA, October 2025.
• R. A. Clemens, ‘Cultures, Technologies, and Media of the Sonic War Machine’ (2025 Braidotti Summer School ‘Beyond Collapsology: from Contemporary Negativity to Affirmation’, Utrecht University, 19 August 2025).
• D. van Dam & R. A. Clemens, ‘“Which no human hands could play:” Anxiety, authenticity, and literature in the age of the Pianola’ (International Association for Word and Music Studies Conference: ‘Frauds and Fakes in Words and Music’, University of Richmond, VA, 29-31 May 2025).
• R. A. Clemens, Keynote talk: ‘Being on the Same Frequency: Ways of Listening to the Incompossible’ (ASCA International Workshop on Re-imagining Universality in the Pluriverse, University of Amsterdam, 26 May 2025).
• R. A. Clemens, ‘Posthuman Music Machines: Literature in the Age of the Pianola’ (LUCAS Role of Experience Reading Group, Leiden University, 27 March 2025).

Research valorisation

In February 2026, Ruth Clemens contributed her expertise to ‘Music and the Mechanical Mind,’ an episode of ‘Words and Music’, BBC Radio Three