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thinking through music

education

October 13, 2026

Resonant Thoughts: James Marriott’s “The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” (2026)

“the beginning of the slow replacement of reality by screen time (65). “The screen tends towards chaos” (71). “The aim of much ‘content’ is not to educate viewers or to inform them. It is not even really to amuse them. The highest aspiration of many of the most successful masters of the medium is simply… Continue reading

Resonant Thoughts

books, education, fiction, reading
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
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 15, 2025

Resonant Thoughts: Richard W. Hamming’s “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn” (1997)

“How are you to recognize ‘fundamentals’? One test is they have lasted a long time. Another test is from the fundamentals all the rest of the field can be derived by using the standard methods in the field” (9). “Creativity seems, among other things, to be ‘usefully’ putting together things which were not perceived to… Continue reading

learning, Uncategorized

art, education, philosophy, science
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
May 22, 2025

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

An essay about experience in the digital age. “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… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, art, Creativity, education, teaching

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.