Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

In many ways, the method by which we now compose and record music, is very much like the editing of film. Film editing takes the linear experience of real life and rearranges the sequence of events to construct a story line, and places things in specific contexts (“reel” life). This is much different from real-time performance, where there are no second chances, and the only option is to do it right the first time. You could film a theatrical event and later go back, rearrange the sequence of events, include a soundtrack and you’d have something completely different from the actual performance. By simply adding a sound to a visual event you can change its meaning. Placing one event before another changes the viewers interpretation of the moment. And in music, making recordings gives us the illusion of things taking place in one moment, but in fact could have taken place days, weeks or even years apart.  [10/19/2026: This is exactly what's happening in the film (or documentary withi...

  *** AI Treatment:

  AI Treatment:

I still haven't decided what I find interesting about AI music or if it's Art per se. Users are attempting it but it will never be art you made entirely by yourself. I write the lyrics--or appropriate other sources, but I didn't write the music or play on it. (You can say you were the "producer" to some degree) As to appropriation, you can make a lyric out of anything--in this case, a section for the book Useless Etymology. "The word and abbreviation “OK” most likely came about as a result of... well, nerds being silly. (Not that anyone reading or writing this book can judge.) Although several other theories have arisen, the predominant theory revolves around the fact that, in the 1830s, collegiate jokesters in Boston and New York came up with a series of slang abbreviations based on deliberately misspelled words." k.g. was short for “kno go” (no go) n.c. was short for “nuff ced” (enough said) k.y. was short for “know yuse” (no use) o.k. was short for “o...

  Released 15 years ago. A few AI versions. Theses aren't bad actually, and is a machine improvising based on the original recordings, picking up on the head, 

  Released 20 years ago about a dystopian world in the future, now with AI treatments. This could have been how it sounded. I was still using a drum-and-bass vibe, even 10 years after it first emerged.   In retrospect, it's now become a Sci-Fi trilogy with Miles From Mars and 2046 . ***

 A 90s prog tune with AI treatment. Lyrics by Pat Gardner.  

 Along Milwaukee   

 AI-generated based on a 2011 song conceived in an open G Minor tuning. All minor chords.  Score:

What was great about pre-20th century creativity was that the pace of technology was slow or even nonexistent. Things simply stayed the same all the time and was a stable environment for creating things—we didn’t feel like we had to be on the bandwagon about everything—have the Medium and the Substack, the Twitter following, and so on. All you need are the basic materials and perhaps a standardization of thinking. I know that has overtones of totalitarianism but what you want to do is to slow down enough to where you can work on one thing for several hours. In my experience, just warming up the creative process can take 3 hours, before anything gets racked up as being creative. In Beethoven’s time, people made things without technological change. Everything was local, and you had a stable atmosphere for creative work. I think we can still go back to something like that: where you have strictly local “sceniuses”. That’s probably hard to do now because things are all online and local com...