brettworks

thinking through music

AI

October 7, 2026

Resonant Thoughts: Jill Lepore’s “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” (2026)

“farms of servers, clouds of data, AI ecosystems—the allusions are always to the natural world that the machinery is destroying” (5). “Within the Artificial State, nearly every element of public and democratic life—civil society, representative government, an informed citizenry, equality of rights, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and faith in elections—is vulnerable to subversion… Continue reading

Resonant Thoughts

AI, artificial-intelligence, philosophy, technology
September 21, 2026

Resonant Thoughts: George Newman’s “How Great Ideas Happen” (2026)

“From this point forward, Mondrian iterates endlessly on this same motif. During the second half of his career, his paintings have an almost obsessive quality as he narrows in and refines. It’s as if he is trying to understand the very limits of what this combination of elements can produce and unearth all that he… Continue reading

Resonant Thoughts

AI, art, Creativity
September 9, 2026

Curating the Week: AI Music, AI Book Scanning, The Uses of Criticism

• An essay on AI music. “In music, as elsewhere, curatorial skill may grow more valuable, along with the ability to write a creative A.I. prompt. (If this sounds to you like a musical dystopia, then you can imagine how Sousa would have felt if he’d learned that d.j.s would eventually conquer the world.) Yet… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, technology, writing
September 1, 2026

Curating the Week: Juggling, Music Teachers, Writing, Tacit Knowledge in Research

• An article about the cognitive benefits of juggling. “Juggling can induce neuroplasticity in the brain, resulting in structural changes and adaptations. It can act as a simple calibration system.” “It’s essential to be ‘right on that edge where it’s not quite comfortable.’” • An essay on music teachers. “Grappling with an unruly instrument and… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, education, learning, teaching, writing
August 18, 2026

Curating The Week: Creative Mindsets, Perceiving Time, AI’s Effects On Writing

• An essay on creative mindsets. “The three years of solitary work at Montpellier had not been wasted in the least: that intellectual isolation was what had allowed [mathematician Alexander Grothendieck] to access the cognitive space where new ideas arise. He had made himself at home there.” “This might look wasteful if you think what… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, writing
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

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.