Thomas Brett
-
Resonant Thoughts: Steve Tupai Francis’ “Kraftwerk’s Computer World” (2022)
“When composing music together, one member, often Ralf or Karl, would introduce a melodic riff or coda, and the other members of the band would ‘jam’ on their synths for several hours. Florian would focus on altering the texture and sound of the music during these sessions. Once locked into a groove they liked, the Continue reading
-
Database: Alessandro Baricco on Vibration As Real Experience
“I will always remember that circular movement of my photography director’s hand, and now I know that what we miss in every digital device, and more in general in the digital world, is that breathing, that waviness, that irregularity. Like a vibration. Was that vibration what we used to call a soul? It’s hard to Continue reading
-
Music’s Subtle Changes Over Time
Music is most magical when it creates perceptual sleights of ear and sounds more than the sum of its parts. Something is happening, but you can’t quite figure out how. Subtle changes over time, once noticed, are the meaningful details and clues to organizing principles: beats interlocking into polyrhythm,pitches coalescing into chords,melting timbre-textures,background moving to Continue reading
-
Resonant Thoughts: Philip Ball’s “Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does” (2016)
“Perhaps the most curious thing about natural patterns is that they come from a relatively limited palette, recurring at very different size scales and in systems that might seem to have nothing at all in common with one another” (12). “What is a pattern, anyway? We usually think of it as something that repeats again Continue reading
