brettworks

thinking through music

artificial-intelligence

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
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
December 3, 2025

Curating The Week: AI and Search, AI in Music, Perfectionism

• An essay on AI and search. “There is a road that must be crossed, by Google and also by the rest of us. On one side is a digital world with its largely familiar structure, fuelled by familiar kinds of advertising, in many of whose forms Google excels. To make liveable whatever lies on… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, music
November 7, 2025

Curating The Week: AI and Thinking, Sound Designing, AI and De-Skilling

• An essay about AI and thinking. “It can seem unnatural, even repulsive, to imagine that a computer program actually understands, actually thinks. We usually conceptualize thinking as something conscious, like a Joycean inner monologue or the flow of sense memories in a Proustian daydream. Or we might mean reasoning: working through a problem step by… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, education, writing
October 29, 2025

Curating the Week: Jack Dejohnette, AI and the Sublime, AI and Cognition, Apple TextEdit, Writing as Thinking

• A tribute to Jack DeJohnette. “The idea of improvisation is tied up in the very nature of our existence. We don’t expect our life to evolve without changing and we never know what’s round the corner – why should music be any different?” • An essay on AI and the sublime. “Sublimity isn’t an… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, technology, writing
October 20, 2025

Resonant Thoughts: Tim Berners-Lee’s “This Is for Everyone” (2025)

“What I was beginning to see was that information was meaningless in isolation. Instead, what truly mattered was the relationship between one piece of information and the next. Context…” (59). “What you wanted, instead, was to encourage new and unexpected relationships between pieces of information to flourish. And, to do that, you had to let… Continue reading

Resonant Thoughts

AI, artificial-intelligence, history, internet, technology

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.