Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

An idea which started with an idea on a bass tuned DGDG. All other rhythm and synth tracks were built on top of it. Almost everything in this track is somehow "vintage": the organ part is almost a Booker T riff from the 60s, the synth sounds are early 80s, even the bass I'm using is a 1962 Jazz Bass. It's also a possible track for the "Immortality Ball", May 1, 2046 (to represent Neone's pre-immortality state). Melange by Lee Barry

In the winter months in any city with glass towers, the low angle of the sun reflects off the structures and casts a warm moon-like reflected light into what would have been areas in shadow. The glass panels also project interesting caustic reflections. I'm surprised cities aren't installing heliostats on tops of buildings to direct sunlight into shadowed areas. (Also known as "daylighting").  They did exactly this in the Norwegian city of Rjukan . As it is in a valley, the town is frequently in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. The installation of heliostats bathes the town square. In northern latitudes that are typically overcast, any sunlight should be cherished. #2019 #reflections #refraction

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 storyline, 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 viewer's 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. In the mid to late 1960s, recording technology grew exponentially. When the ...

 On Drone Music (Speakers On Drones):   Recent iterations: System of a Sound at Australian National University, where weather data is correlated music moods.   ***   The Broken Cello system. ***   The “Ambient Jukebox” Multi-Dimensional Random Sound Environment By: Lee Barry October 19, 2002 Surround-sound and other 3-dimensional sound environments hold great promise in the future of recorded music. In traditional stereo, sound can only be separated into a flat uni-dimensional configuration, coming from only two sound sources. In a natural acoustic environment, sounds come from all directions, reflecting off various surfaces. In fact, stereo panning is a very primitive attempt at recreating an acoustical space. For example, you might pan a guitar to the left channel to suggest that the player is situated on the left, but in a real environment, reflections would be coming from all directions. I coined the term Ambient Jukebox (“AJ”) to describe a system where m...