brettworks

thinking through music

writing

September 15, 2026

Resonant Thoughts: Geoff Dyer’s “The Ongoing Moment” (2005)

“[Photographer] Dorothea Lange also believed that ‘to know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting.’ As far as she was concerned it was fine for a photographer to work ‘completely without plan’ and just photograph ‘that to which he instinctively responds’. Taking Lange… Continue reading

Resonant Thoughts

art, photography, writing
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 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
July 1, 2026

Arrows Of Attention: Musical Prompting

You’re a soloist who specializes in 19th-century Romantic music. You have no sheet music in front of you and don’t consider yourself an improviser, yet at your instrument you’re able to remember fragments of themes, chord progressions, and melodies from dozens of different composers whose works you’ve practiced and performed. Use this partial knowledge to… Continue reading

arrows of attention, musical prompts

music, 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
June 11, 2026

Resonant Thoughts: Paul Morley’s “A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite Its Entire History)” (2020)

“Do we lose that sense of the greater purpose of music – once it is set inside the flat, if relentless and very helpful, music services – as this other language, this alien presence taking on the unknown, defending us against all kinds of threats, danger and tension? Will this near-monstrous availability of music, the… Continue reading

Resonant Thoughts

music, writing
June 9, 2026

Music Without A Body

In Times Square the guys hawking their hip hop CDs and the guys hawking their fake Buddhist bracelets are of a piece, both unaware that art, as a commodity, has no value. But the hawkers know something about symbolic value and that the way of imbuing their wares with magic is through their person. The… Continue reading

Uncategorized

music, Spotify, 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.