Hi everybunny! Welcome back to the Backstage Burrow! 🐰✨ Today is a MONUMENTAL episode because we have a very special guest hopping into the tunnel: Sarah Wallin Huff! Sarah is taking over the Burrow to share her mind-blowing presentation From Clockwork to Quantum, tracing humanity’s 2,000-year quest to decouple the performer from the performance.

From wind-powered hydraulics to 9th-century programmable flutes, Mozart-era musical clockwork, player pianos, and modern MIDI—are our modern panics about AI creative work really anything new? (Spoiler alert: NOPE!) Paws ready, ears flopping, let's dive down the rabbit hole to find out! 🥕🎶

Check out Sarah's book "History of Technology in Music" at https://sjwallin.url.lol/mu3100-book

Also, get a closer look at the slides featured from her talk at https://sjwallin.url.lol/sfslides

Welcome back to the Backstage Burrow for Episode 7! In this episode, we run zoomies through the history of Western music notation to explore how a chaotic need for standardization sparked a brilliant visual revolution. From Charlemagne’s aggressive 800 AD decree forcing the rise of "neumes"—small squiggles and dots used as memory aids—to Guido of Arezzo hyping up the drawing of actual lines on a page to unlock sight-reading, we examine how medieval innovators completely transformed the underlying framework of human creativity.

We also trace how the mind-melting complexity of florid organum and the medieval motet forced trailblazers to eventually assign precise mathematical values directly to the physical shapes of noteheads. By completely unshackling the human mind from rigid oral traditions, these rule-breaking musical breakthroughs gave composers the ultimate green light to innovate, stacking harmonies and rhythms like never before. So keep your ears pricked, your paws tapping, and let's hop right down the rabbit hole into Part 2 of the wild history of sheet music!

Hi everybunny! Welcome back to the Backstage Burrow! 🐰🌾 Today, we are running zoomies through time to uncover the wild, weird, and wonderful roots of how humans first figured out how to lock down their tunes in a tangible way. Long before you could just drop a link or print sheet music, passing down songs meant relying entirely on a high-stakes game of oral tradition and human memory—from intense apprenticeships in India to 1,000-year-old court traditions in Japan. But what happens when ancient civilizations try to "freeze" sound onto Sumerian stone tablets, Chinese bells, or Greek inscriptions? 📜🗿

In this episode, we dive down the rabbit hole to explore the mind-blowing difference between relative and absolute pitch, and we’ll tease the massive Medieval crisis that hit when an empire demanded everyone sing their religious chants the same way. How do you invent a code for something you can only hear? Grab your snacks and tune in to see how we trapped sound waves—and stick around for Part 2 to meet a frustrated Italian monk who helped change human creativity forever! ✨