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thinking through music

AI

September 30, 2025

Curating The Week: Essay Writing, Zombie Democracy, Alva Noto, AI as Magical Thinking

• An essay by Zadie Smith about writing essays. “I developed a different sense of what an essay could be. I understood all three men to be ‘personal essayists’ in the sense that they cared passionately about their subjects, but they themselves were rarely figures in any particular piece; their energies were directed elsewhere. And… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, education, writing
September 4, 2025

Curating The Week: Running, Terry Riley, Wisdom, A.I.

• A video (with music) about running. • An essay on Terry Riley. “I felt like a transcendentalist, an illusionist, or a magician. Something that has to do with magic. I feel it’s my field to create magic in sound. Magic in the sense of transcendence of this ordinary life into another realm. An awakening,… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, consciousness, philosophy, spirituality, wisdom
August 8, 2025

Art As Search

(Rembrandt, A Scholar in his Study, c. 1640s) In 1998, when Google introduced their proprietary Internet search engine, the definition of the word search shifted. Searching had long been a laborious process of seeking carefully and thoroughly for information and insight on a topic. It took a lot work, usually by an individual with a… Continue reading

artists, asking questions

AI, artificial-intelligence, technology
July 22, 2025

Curating The Week: Fake AI Bands, AI’s Effects on Writing and Reading

• An article on fake AI bands. “The internet has fragmented and flattened subcultures. The Velvet Sundown’s puppeteers present the band’s soft pastiche of genres—psychedelic, folk, indie—as sophisticated fusion, but of course it’s nothing more than a careless smear of stylistic averages. Psychedelic, folk, and indie rock each in their own way have something to… Continue reading

AI, Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, music, technology, writing
July 1, 2025

Resonant Thoughts: Samuel Arbesman’s “The Magic of Code” (2025)

“Enchantment and the belief in nonsense never disappeared in our modern scientific age. Similarly, the worlds of enchantment—or really, wonder—and disenchantment have existed alongside each other in the realm of computing. The utilitarian road of staid and corporate coding has always run beside the path walked by those delighted by the marvels of these machines,… Continue reading

Brett’s Sound Picks

AI, art, artificial-intelligence, chatgpt, technology
May 22, 2025

Curating The Week: Experience In The Digital Age, Swing Changes And Teachers, Social Media Art, Narrative Warfare

“It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world,… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, art, Creativity, education, teaching
May 7, 2025

Curating The Week: AI and The Mind, AI and The Humanities, Enji

“It’s becoming clear that artificial intelligence can relieve us of the burden of trying and trying again. A.I. systems make it trivially easy to take an existing thing and ask for a new iteration.” “The whole painful cycle of trying, failing, revising, judging, and redoing can be replaced with something simpler: plucking the most suitable… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, consciousness, philosophy, technology
April 22, 2025

Curating The Week: The Bottleneck, Drum Machines, AI and Writing, What To Do

• An essay on the bottleneck. “The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.” “It starts with substitution:… Continue reading

AI, Curating The Week, drum machines

AI, artificial-intelligence, chatgpt, technology, writing
April 3, 2025

Curating The Week: Athletic Training, Work, Elite Cubing, AI Love

• An essay an athletic training. “The main idea of my training program was that you will become good at whatever it is that you train.” “My training program was very simple and therefore very robust. It was cheap and reliable. Not fancy nor extraordinary. I tried not to involve things that I could not… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, politics, technology, writing
October 17, 2024

Curating The Week: AI Voice Bots, AI Writing, Brian Eno’s Production Approach, Skateboarding

• An article about interacting with AI conversation agents. “Other modern sciences have constrained themselves in accordance with an emerging code of ethics. There are weapons that physicists have sworn not to build, experiments biologists have agreed not to conduct. Nothing holds back computer scientists from developing talking machines that pretend to be humans.” •… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, music

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.