brettworks

• An article about AI and the music industry.

“Human civilization is not just built on U2, Harry Potter, and Picasso but also on experimental artists, Grimms’ fairy tales, and the Amen break. There are longtime calls for legislators to impose a compulsory license on music sampling, just as fashion designers have proposed similar schemes for clothes (compensating those whose styles are copied), and visual artists have asked for compensation when their works are resold at much higher values. A compulsory license for generative A.I. is admittedly broader than any of these, and the details would be even more complicated—merely determining who is owed royalties would be a difficult undertaking. But artists have been known to topple kings and move governments; they can aspire at least to out-influence the machines.

• An article about flaneuring.

“To walk a city led by your senses rather than a destination is to awaken to the city and, possibly, to yourself. It’s an opportunity to expand your capacity for wonder, to discover and delight in things you might have missed had you been aiming to get somewhere.”

• An interview with producer Tim Hecker.

“There are different feelings in those different moments, and they each have their own ecosystem. I’m using 24 channels of bleeding, contaminated, overloaded, feedbacking pieces that link to all the others. I don’t want a straightforward emotion — the best things for me are the ones that are confusing as to how I feel.”

• An article about boredom.

“One camp contends that boredom stems from a deficit in meaning: we can’t sustain interest in what we’re doing when we don’t fundamentally care about what we’re doing. Another school of thought maintains that it’s a problem of attention: if a task is either too hard for us or too easy, concentration dissipates and the mind stalls.”

• An article about the low-pitched hum of the universe.

“[The hum] could be coming from hundreds of thousands, or possibly a million, overlapping signals from the cosmic merger history of supermassive black hole binaries.”