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thinking through music


  • March 21, 2025

    Curating The Week: The Serum Synthesizer, Insight, Being A Media Theorist

    An interview with Steve Duda, the designer of the Serum synthesizer. “What you want is some sort of motor memory—sort of like what makes a QUERTY keyboard great is that you know where the W key is without having to look down. So with Serum there’s a bit of that same concept—you want to know… Continue reading

    Curating The Week
    Creativity, psychology
  • March 19, 2025

    From The Archives: “OV 2” (2023)

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    expressivity, from the archives, voice
  • March 17, 2025

    atelier: marimbafied 13

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    atelier, marimba, piano music
  • March 13, 2025

    Ventrilo-Dialogue: Two A.I.’s Have a Conversation About The Brettworks Database (2025)

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    AI, database, fake conversations, ventrilo-dialogue
  • March 12, 2025

    Database: Aphex Twin On Working Out New Musical Languages And Reconfiguring The Brain

    “I work intuitively. I actually prefer it if I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. If you’ve got an equal temperament piano keyboard, then you know what you’re going to get if you play certain chords. But I actually like it if you don’t know where the notes are, because then you do it… Continue reading

    database, intuition
  • March 10, 2025

    Marimbafied 10

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    anti-boredom, atelier
  • March 8, 2025

    Database: Moritz von Oswald On Rhythms That Stand Still

    “We used patterns that weren’t really defined, but they work with each other and are constantly changing. It’s a state where the music is not moving, just kept like a Polaroid, in a way, where you have something going on rhythmically, but it actually stands still at the same time.” Moritz von Oswald Continue reading

    database, Uncategorized
  • March 6, 2025

    atelier: piano (open loops series) (2.3.25)

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    atelier
  • March 5, 2025

    Resonant Thoughts: Christopher Alexander’s “The Nature of Order” (2002)

    “What is order? We know that everything in the world around us is covered by an immense orderliness. We experience order every time we take a walk. The grass, the sky, the leaves on the trees, the flowing water in the river, the windows in the houses along the street–all of it is immensely orderly.… Continue reading

    aesthetics, Resonant Thoughts
  • March 4, 2025

    Resonant Thoughts: Anna Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley” (2020)

    “Listening to EDM while I worked gave me delusions of grandeur, but it kept me in a rhythm. It was the genre of my generation: the music of video games and computer effects, the music of the twenty-four-hour hustle, the music of proudly selling out. It was decadent and cheaply made, the music of ahistory,… Continue reading

    Resonant Thoughts
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Thomas Brett is a musician and writer who holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from New York University. He is the author of Principles of Electronic Music Production and The Creative Electronic Music Producer, a book described by Sound On Sound magazine as “a deep philosophical analysis of the various creative inspirations, ideas and processes involved in producing electronic music.” His essays have appeared in the journals Popular Music and Popular Music and Society, as well as edited collections by Routledge, Oxford, and Cambridge University presses. Thomas has played percussion on Broadway since 1997 and writes about music at brettworks.com.

Recent Posts

  • Database: Christian Löffler on Working Quickly and Using Field Recordings
  • Curating the Week: The Additional Touch, Philip Glass’s Music, How to Write a Paper
  • Performance Practice: Lessons from Music for 18 Musicians
  • Resonant Thoughts: James Marriott’s “The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” (2026)
  • 5 October

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