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brettworks

thinking through music


  • July 29, 2022

    Flights

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    Uncategorized
  • July 26, 2022

    Accretion By Small Decisions

    When I’m making music I try to prioritize the performative parts of my workflow over other, more technical tasks, because performing—which can be defined as committing to a concentrated state over time—intuitively feels like the most musical thing I can do (and it’s something I’ve practiced). I’ve written here about the urgency of performance and… Continue reading

    decision-making
  • July 25, 2022

    Once Reverie Sets In

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    who cares if you listen?, why doesn’t he just write about music instead?
  • July 20, 2022

    Shifting Frames Of Reference

    If you work in tandem with digital music technologies, you may find yourself adrift in possibilities and a prisoner of recency bias, as your focus slips and slides and your attention wanders towards whatever seems most exciting right now. One way to mobilize this scatter and focus your work is to commit to whatever sound… Continue reading

    frames of attention
  • July 19, 2022

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Teddy Rok’s “Awake” (2022)

    2022 playlist here Continue reading

    Brett’s Sound Picks
  • July 18, 2022

    Manifold

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    Uncategorized
  • July 14, 2022

    Curating The Week: Bass Philosophy, Textural Details In Animated Film, The Musician and Music Technologies

    • A video about the philosophy of bass in music production. “It’s your choice how you think about the psychoacoustic element: either your brain hears those upper harmonics, and calculates that there must be a low fundamental causing that harmonic series to emerge. Or the inherent nonlinearities of your hearing mean those sum and difference… Continue reading

    Curating The Week
  • July 12, 2022

    Notes On Dylan Henner’s Marimba Music

    “I still believe that the primary virtue and usefulness of criticism resides precisely in its limitations—in the fact that the critic’s fragile linguistic tryst with the visible object is always momentary, ephemeral, and local to its context. The experience blooms up in the valley of its saying, to borrow W.H. Auden’s phrase, but it does… Continue reading

    editing, marimba
  • July 11, 2022

    Unsynced

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    Uncategorized
  • July 7, 2022

    Resonant Thoughts: Richard Sennett’s “The Craftsman” (2008)

    “Going over an action again and again, by contrast, enables self-criticism. Modern education fears repetitive learning as mind-numbing. Afraid of boring children, avid to present ever-different stimulation, the enlightened teacher may avoid routine-but thus deprives children of the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating it from within.” “The difficult and the incomplete… Continue reading

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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

  • Resonant Thoughts: John Ashbery’s “A Wave” (1984)
  • Art About Music: Google’s Lyria 3 (2026)
  • Studio Observations: Listening To Improvisation
  • Database: Shane Parish on Revoicing and the Game Of Subtraction
  • Jup-8000, No. 1

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