brettworks

• An essay about returning to the mandolin at an older age.

“Is domestic music a second-class thing? Discovering this history, I felt strongly what a different phenomenon music is when you make it yourself. You’re inside it, living it, experiencing a pleasure so intense that pleasure is perhaps no longer the word. This surely helps explain why older people are turning to it.”

• An article on sound design and improvisation.

“I don’t see sound design as a linear signal path, more as a continuum. So, instead of tweaking isolated parameters one at a time, think of the process as a dynamic, interconnected loop. Select a waveform, shape it with a filter, mould it further with an envelope, throw in some reverb or delay, maybe a compressor, then circle back to adjust the oscillator again. Keep moving through this loop until the sound begins to speak to you. As your track evolves, this same improvisatory logic can scale up to inform your broader compositional and production decisions.”

• An essay on the use of AI in writing.

“Now that artificial intelligence is breaching the wall around writing, that simplicity is no longer something we’ll be able to assume. But, by the same token, the virtues of the traditional approach, which once hardly needed to be articulated, now stand in greater relief. In an autotuned or A.I.-synthesized world, perfection and imperfection carry new meanings: the human faults that technology irons out become perfect in their own way, and the smooth surfaces created through technology risk feeling blank and featureless.”

• An essay about AI’s impact on artists.

“I am an artist, and 2022 was the year when I first started to see knock-offs of my work. It was not my work exactly. It was instead a strange facsimile, as if done by a none-too-talented teenager on tranquilisers, all my lines and blotches reduced to rote. I quickly learned the reason. AI image generators had scraped my entire body of work off the internet and fed it to their bots, to be excreted out as a product.”

• An article on the effects of nature on attention.

“One of the most important things about nature, according to attention restoration researchers, is that it is ‘softly fascinating,’ meaning it tickles our attention in a gentle way without being too boring or stimulating. (Think about watching ocean waves roll in and out, or gazing at a field of wildflowers.) Urban environments, by contrast, are more harshly fascinating and demand our vigilance in a way that depletes us.”