brettworks

thinking through music

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
March 11, 2026

Curating The Week: The Brand Age, Selling Out, Sync Music

• An essay on the brand age. “Branding isn’t merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it. Branding by definition has to be distinctive. But good design, like math or science, seeks the right answer, and right answers tend to converge.” “Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal.” “One obvious lesson is to stay away… Continue reading

Curating The Week

art, i-really-dont-need-wordpress-recommending-tags-for-posts, music, 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
January 30, 2026

Same Walk, Different Music

Tom Thomson, Hot Summer Moonlight (1915) Debussy, Images, Livre II, Et la lune descends sur la temple qui fut (1907). In the early 1990s I spent the evenings of one summer typing up book notes for my mom, who had returned to graduate school to pursue a PhD in English literature. (Her dissertation used psychoanalytic… Continue reading

same walk, different music

music, writing
January 22, 2026

Change One Thing

Paul Klee, Ancient Sound (1925) “The key about a process is that it has time in it.” – Nassim Taleb, Fooled By Randomness When I’m writing new music I sometimes preserve one thing from a previous project, but change it slightly. Let’s say I’ve just finished a work for solo keyboard. Usually what happens is… Continue reading

musical mottos

music, technology, writing
January 19, 2026

Curating The Week: The Act Of Making, A Music Production Manifesto, Attention

“The act of making something is so good, so good.” • A manifesto on electronic music production. “Technology answers to technique. Every device and piece of gear has secrets that can be unveiled with the right technique.” “After more than thirty years of making music with computers, we still do not know the DAW and… Continue reading

Curating The Week

books, mindfulness, 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 10, 2025

Holding Out For Better

“Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its center and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognizable as your own.The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.” John Berger, About Looking (1980), 204-205. There’s a type of being stuck that I quite like… Continue reading

stuckness

music, writing
November 24, 2025

Resonant Thoughts: Ben Ratliff’s “Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening” (2025)

“It occurred to me that there was a connection between the act of listening and the act of running, and I began to write from that point of connection” (24). “I am talking about running the song: a way to engage with the music’s forward patterns, its implications, its potential, its intention, and even its… Continue reading

Resonant Thoughts

music, 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

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.