Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

 Seed:    

There was an interesting study that was done a few years ago on the complexity of lyrics. But there’s a difference between those who write scientific papers about lyrics and those who actually write and sing them, which has an interesting connection with AI-generation of songs where the “singers” are just LLMs shuffling patterns to match riffs. When I work on a lyric, I’m focusing on how the quality of words to be used musically, especially at the rhythmic level. How syllables are mapped over note values is crucial. I think lyrics should be as economical as possible, which is the issue with translations from English because you’re “deracinating” the natural speech rhythms. With the Esperanto lyrics, the music sounds fine on its own with the vocals just being another instrument. If you don’t understand the words, then it’s essentially an instrumental. Most people don't tune into lyrics. The music is most important on first hearing, but lyrics can soak in over time.

Why am I so attracted to AI for generating material? I had been involved in generative music in the ‘90s creating music from seed structures, and I’m still interested in that, but sometimes I find myself wasting too much time going to websites, logging in, thinking of text prompts to generate music–when I can generate music from an idea or simply pick up a guitar or a bass and I’ll have an idea within seconds. Like this morning: There was a Bill Clinton quote in my diary on 9/22/2010: “They always like you better when you’re gone.” I heard a 12/8 minor blues in it. For the past 4 or 5 months I have been generating music from words and phrases that are in my diary and I jot them down in my Songday notebook. I wouldn’t necessarily want to generate music algorithmically as a first choice. It would be interesting to have my own large language model that would generate music based on the inputs that I give it, such as a rhythm or melody and see what happens. A lot of creativity is “Let’s tr...

  September Songs  

  [View Gallery]   The first images are photos of the TV that I took as I was watching various commemorations and footage of the event. When I got downtown, I started taking pictures of buildings that serve as a snapshot memory.  On 911, they had closed the office at about 10:30 and I started to walk around to take photos. I had gotten my first camera about a month before, and I wasn't completely familiar with it, so most of the photos were overexposed. Later on I inverted them, which is a look that I liked. So I thought that I would take overexposed pictures and then invert them in the same fashion.   

Improvisation is a form of spontaneous composition that uses predetermined structural elements, usually chords and scales. Jazz improvisation is understood as being free-form, but is controlled with rules. In Arabic music, there is Taqsim, guided by a different system of rules for improvisation—and similarly with Indian Raga. The eastern versions of improvisation have an additional cultural element that is more important than the West’s focus on improvisation for art’s sake. Interestingly, Taqsim may possibly have some connection with algorithms (simply a series of rules or instructions). The word algorithm is eponymous with Algoritmi, a Persian mathematician. The fact that jazz musicians can relate to physics (and vice versa) is perhaps not just coincidental!             The curious thing about improvisation in anything is that there are always some rules or constraints that are not universal, e.g. a jazz player would be confused by the rules of Taqsi...

 

   Early 70s Genesis treatment:   

 Fast and Slow

Technology is always a part of the flow. (Once you have a skill and you've used it for decades you can always hop back on the bike, unlike many things we have done with computers. You can learn software, but the software is always requiring updating your knowledge of its new functions. If you want to develop skill for a lifetime, choose the more manual skills that don't involve tools that are always changing. Even new power tools will get in the way if using your manual skill because you have to stop and devote attention to them. I have yet to learn the Dorico software which replaced Finale. If for some reason Finale stopped working I could still continue writing manually, but it would be going back to the stone age, and I'd have to trade my creative time with software training. So the happy medium is to have just enough skill with a range of new and old tools. Most artists need some kind of handicap assistance. AI is another tool that assists, just as MIDI did for me in th...