brettworks

thinking through music

AI

July 8, 2026

Curating The Week: Making Early Digital Art, Mastering, AI and Ethics

Roy Lichtenstein, Landscape in Fog (1996) • An essay about making early digital art. “It’s 1990, and I still don’t know where the darn tiger comes from. But I do know that there’s no program that will draw one from scratch, any size or pose or color or style, like I want it, without an… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, art
July 2, 2026

Resonant Thoughts: Cory Doctorow’s “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” (2026)

“Art is what happens when an artist has a big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling in their mind, which they infuse into some artistic medium—a book, a song, a dance, a painting, a photograph, and such—in the hopes of making a facsimile of that big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling materialize in the minds of people who… Continue reading

Resonant Thoughts

AI, art, artificial-intelligence, technology, writing
June 23, 2026

Curating The Week: AI as System, AI’s Didacticism, Vermeer’s Art

• An essay by L.M. Sacasas on how AI is a system, not a tool. “AI is not a tool in this sense, it is an environment which envelops the user and works on us from the inside out while we naively think that we remain unchanged by our use so long as we are… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, technology, writing
June 12, 2026

Curating The Week: AI’s Conversation Deep Fakes, Notre-Dame’s (New) Acoustics, AI and Human Agency, AI and Creativity

• An essay on AI’s conversation deep fakes. “The term deepfake traditionally refers to photos, audio, and video, but when it comes to discussions of consciousness, we need to regard text as a deepfake medium as well. Just as it is vastly easier to generate a realistic video of an astronaut in orbit around Alpha… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, writing
May 24, 2026

Curating The Week: AI Slop Prehistory, Lo-Fi Rebellion Against AI, The Attention Economy And Anxiety

• An essay on the prehistory of AI slop. “text produced by large language models, however remarkable, sophisticated, and even occasionally wondrous, is derivative, average, predictable. It is language without a mind. But is that even language?” “There’s nothing wrong with nonsense. But it’s not always poetry. And mistaking one for the other is another… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, writing
April 15, 2026

Curating The Week: Playing Mandolin, Sound Design, AI in Writing, AI’s Impact On Artists, Nature and Attention

• 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… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, music, technology, writing
March 19, 2026

Curating The Week: AI and Human Touch, AI and Writing, AI and Taste

• An essay on AI, music, and the demand for the human touch. “Echoing AI commentary today, some musicians viewed the player piano as not just replicating human playing, but exceeding it. The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky explained that he wrote pieces specifically for the machines because ‘there are tone combinations beyond my ten fingers,’… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, technology, writing
February 14, 2026

Curating The Week: Consicousness, AI, Writing Rooms, Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force

• An interview with Michael Pollan. “Our consciousness is being polluted, and protecting ourselves against that at the same time we preserve the ability to act politically is a difficult balancing act. Consciousness is a very precious realm. It’s the realm of our privacy and our freedom to think. So I think we need some… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, consciousness, writing
February 3, 2026

Art Is Artisanal

AI’s incursion into art-making raises the question, What defines the artist’s skill set? Artists are artisans and art is artisanal. Building on this, consider six qualities of art’s artisanal-ness and how AI fails to achieve them. Art-making is by hand. Playing music, writing, painting, dancing, cooking—art contains and expresses traces of the body that made… Continue reading

Uncategorized

AI, art, Creativity
December 31, 2025

Curating The Week: Artistic Toil, Aphoristic Intelligence, AI Slop, Reclaiming One’s Mind

• An essay on artistic toil. “…instances of just how willing the great artists are to undergo tedious, repetitive, finger-cramping work—toil—in the service of their craft. In some of these examples, such as the stonework of a cathedral, there was a higher purpose to justify the toil. But often it seems that the artists engaged… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, art, artificial-intelligence, technology, writing

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.