We like to categorize things—put them in neat little boxes with defined walls, with simple labels, and expect that nothing will ever challenge or break free of those molds. We do this with people, with media, and clothing, we even do it with tools. We assign something, anything, a function, and we rarely think about the ways in which it might work outside of those parameters.

Take the computer for example. We have expectations for our computers. We want them to be good at math and processing data. We want them to assist us in our daily tasks, to look things up when we don’t know the answer. To store our documents and photos.

What we don’t expect our computers to do, is help us understand what it might feel like to die, or assist us in evoking an emotional response through heart-wrenching musicality. These, in our categorized belief system, are human endeavors—distinctly separate from science and innovation.

Yet, computers can do these things, and they are, all of the time.

Dr. Nicholas Laudadio has been examining this relationship between technology, music, humanity, and art for the better part of the last twenty years. His research has looked at the many ways in which electronic music, especially analog synthesizers, have been infused into the genre of Science Fiction media. In studying this blurring of lines between man and machine, between musical performance and technology, a paradigm shifts in our own understanding of what it really means to be human.