Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

    AI extension as Prog. Interesting that it picks up the 6/4. 

In the late 20th century, (post-1965) pop music gradually became more of a collage art, with appropriated pieces quickly assembled and placed in ironic contexts and juxtapositions (techniques borrowed from the visual arts). Whereas craft was more of a cornerstone of the creation of works of art, someone got the idea that art should also have cleverness, or what I have sometimes referred to as the "fourth dimension" of art, i.e. the ideas suffused in the art, but not always reflected in the surface.  Today, the quintessential definition of a true composer of music is one who can collage together loops, sound samples and readymade textures, not melodies, chords and rhythms. The true suffering for one's art is not by these noble means, but rather by prefabbed concoctions, or found sounds snatched by license set forth by the Creative Commons. While it is a nice idea that we can share-alike, the upshot is that the average listener attributes what they hear as being created by ...

The tuning is interesting as it exploits the use of open strings and hammer-ons, and is essentially the bottom 4 strings of an open G tuning, or a G5 chord. Octaves become ninths Could this have been written is standard tuning? Possibly. It has chord changes that you could play a bass part against. But it won't have the same vibe: The strings are slackened and they give the bass a bit more growl.   

    Since I'm currently not interested in being in a band, I'm very interested in discovering bands and forming fake bands with AI. I find it incredibly interesting from a conceptual standpoint, and it has given musicians, or even the general public, the ability to do those kinds of things. As a musician, I see it as a separate "department" aside from my other things that I do in music, now involving going back and doing manual scoring. I see it as kind of a bookending of my musical abilities.  AI generation is essentially a listener's activity. This is not uninteresting in itself, because as a musician, you have to have the ability to listen to and assess what's going on in the music on a micro level, almost imperceptibly. But the other part of music, at least for the last half-century or more, has been really more of a visual art. Once an album is done, the album art has to be created, which is also an interesting aspect that conceptualizes the whole piece. ...

  Medici Slot Machine --Joseph Cornell The shortest one yet @25 seconds.  Rule for the fives A minute or less Shortest one yet At 25 secs AI Treatment:

Voice is of Elisis Livingston of the Shambala retreat in Glastonbury. She was a subject in the documentary by Richard Dawkins titled Enemies of Reason . Music is mine, which I remixed to feature her voice. It is more of a parody than a tribute to her spiritual vision, but there is a certain power in her voice in context with the music, and I like how one affects the other.   The "lyric": We come here to move through time and through space Allow the eyes to gently close Smile a very best smile Swallow the smile, with some saliva  into the heart And let the heart smile back at you And there's a warm and a welcoming feeling Joy without end Grace, beauty, laughter Deep knowing of the wise being that you are And the golden glow that comes from the heart Comes from a golden flower And use the gold light from the centre of the flower like a sunbeam And beam it onto those petals And wake them up There is a second part that's very personal And this is to step inside the pearl ...

 AI Music is causing daily cognitive dissonance because I'm not sure it's art writ large. If there were a visual equivalent, it would be a prefab collage with some overpainting created by the lyrics and the prompt script. The results are interesting, and you like them on your wall as decoration. I'm not sure how it could be recontextualized or appropriated because it would force the hacking of something admired for its decorative qualities. For it to be art, you'd have to channel Ai Weiwei in some way, like the dropping of Han Dynasty urns, but those urns would rather be cheap replicas. Some people actually like the urns and have sentimental value, even though they are inexpensive. Some AI music can gather those kinds of feelings if there is some kind of emotional connection with a loved one, or associated with a time or place. There are songs I generated that evoke places where I was when I was working on the lyrics. They are my "musical daydreams" that are p...

 

One of the interesting things about keeping a diary—especially electronic diaries—is that you can compile a lot of information. I've been keeping an Evernote diary since 2009. In the beginning, I just saved articles to it to read later, and now it's become encyclopedic in some ways. It's my personal internet. A while back I was thinking about nudges. (There was a book that came out in 2013 by Cass Sunstein titled Nudge ). I had a note in my diary about doing a piece on it and then I ran a search in Evernote and I have articles going back to 2010 talking about nudging—especially nudging with technology using notifications and algorithms.  What's remarkable about digital text is that you can amass a lot of it and you can go back and do searches and then collect that information and shape it again in a recursive process, which is interesting because our minds are naturally recursive in some ways—continually connecting to something else—winnowing it down—-a narrowing. Last ...

 Amazing what you can do with just MIDI output.