Skip to content
    • about
    • ai in music resources
    • archives
    • art about music
    • atelier
    • books
    • brett’s sound picks
    • database (a cache of perceptions)
    • film
    • interview
    • keywords
    • music
    • thought tools
    • ventrilo-dialogues

brettworks

thinking through music


  • August 8, 2024

    Brett’s Sound Picks: JakoJako’s “Introspektion” (2024)

    playlist Continue reading

    Brett’s Sound Picks
  • August 7, 2024

    Resonant Thoughts: Martin Wolf’s “The Crisis Of Democratic Capitalism” (2023)

    “The legitimacy of any system always depends on performance. In the end, people will cease to trust a system that does not work for them.” “The rise of demagogic nationalism and authoritarianism in high-income democracies—the core of today’s political crisis—can be attributed in significant part to…economic failures. The problem is not just the economic failures… Continue reading

    Resonant Thoughts
  • August 6, 2024

    Two Pianos

    Continue reading

    piano music
  • August 5, 2024

    Keywords: Vibe

    (Photo: Khashayar Kouchpeydeh) Short for vibration, vibe poetically describes music’s most intangible yet palpable quality: its feeling. Vibe is how music feels over time, how its vibrations sustain a mood, conjure an aura, and keep an affect aloft like smoke billowing on a windless day. Describing a music’s vibe is difficult and requires assigning a… Continue reading

    keywords, vibe
  • August 2, 2024

    Curating The Week: Spotify, The Tyranny Of Ideas, The Music Of Breadmaking

    An article about Spotify. “Music on the app is most easily consumed in a disorganized cascade; every song becomes audio ‘content’ separated from a musician’s larger body of work. In short, Spotify does not seem to care about your relationship to ‘your’ music anymore; for long-term users, this has felt like a slow-motion bait and… Continue reading

    Curating The Week
  • August 1, 2024

    Harmonium Study

    Continue reading

    harmonium
  • July 31, 2024

    Database: Max Cooper On Parameter Spaces

    “The Prophet-6 is my most used synth. It’s just got a nice balance of not trying to do too much, but doing enough to be flexible. The parameter space it covers is high proportion beautiful. Any synth, you’ve got a bunch of parameters with continuous values. If you’ve got 50 parameters, you’ve got a 50… Continue reading

    database
  • July 30, 2024

    Resonant Thoughts: Robert M. Persig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (1974)

    “The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn’t any other test.” “The craftsman isn’t… Continue reading

    craft, Resonant Thoughts
    crafting, philosophy
  • July 29, 2024

    Keywords: Trust The Hands

    If you’re a musician of some experience you know things about music not from the outside, as a listener, but from your body, as a practitioner. Trust the hands is the heuristic of letting your understanding unfold through your playing. Whether at a keyboard, fretboard, or computer, your hands come to know a musical-instrumental terrain… Continue reading

    hand knowledge, keywords
  • July 27, 2024

    Resonant Thoughts: Ben Murphy’s “Ears To The Ground” (2024)

    “There seems to be a trend of placing field recordings into electronic music, presumably to portray some sort of connection between organic and electronic worlds […] For me, this sort of approach has become a bit of a trope, and I think there are much more interesting ways of including field recordings. The thing I… Continue reading

    Resonant Thoughts
«Previous Page Next Page»

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

  • 14 October
  • 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)

Subscribe To Brettworks


©

brettworks

2022, All Rights Reserved.

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Subscribe Subscribed
    brettworks
    Join 780 other subscribers

    Have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.

  • brettworks
    View site in Reader
    Manage subscriptionsSign upLog in
    Report this content
    Collapse this bar