Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

  Artificial intelligence is obviously more capable of evoking emotions than it was only a year ago. With this song, it's typically a cut-up of various diary entries, in this case, April 28ths. It also references a passage from W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn , where he mentions sunken willows. The original title was Through Brundall on to Cantley , but the sunken willows image captured the mood perfectly. I also think that it's a nice combination of poetry and lyric, where they can kind of function the same way, with fragments of images, such as the fragmented nature of dream imagery. It's what's termed as “Sebaldian”--having to do with Sebald’s dreamy prose. The photography is also interesting, and was taken in the mid to late 19th century in the same area as the path that was taken in Rings of Saturn through towns in East Anglia (Cantley). The playlist also includes an ambient mix, which takes just the vocal set against various field recordings of wind and waves.  ...

8/31/2002 “Isn’t melody a rhythm?” (It wouldn’t be if it wasn’t). A rhythm can exist on its own, but melody needs rhythm to survive.   [Imagine a series of diatonic random pitches that was generated from AI. There would obviously be a rhythm because music exists in time. But rhythm is in fact a melody because melodies tend to have logic and syntax as opposed to things that are random. Melodies are coherent by nature, but rhythms have to be as well. Drumming can also be melodic, as jazz drumming is].    8/31/2005           Wynton Marsalis on Nightline talking about the history and cultural importance of New Orleans, especially its influence on American music. Jazz music was the “sound of democracy” of everyone swinging, drums and bass grooving together. (I think this is an excellent metaphor).             The future of New Orleans can be like the future of Chicago after the fire, and it can revive itself...

8/30/2006 People who stutter often speak in the voices of other characters in order to avoid stuttering. (The brain provides a heuristic as a solution to hide or mask the problem.) It’s like the woman with Alzheimer’s who forgot how to speak, but could sing songs and remember all the lyrics. Singing is a form of avoidance or creative diversion from the stress involved in speech. 8/30/2009             When you hear something for the second time, your mind returns to ‘memory landmarks’ set on first hearing, and are automatically recalled on second review. Try this yourself: listen to a program with a mobile audio device, such as a podcast, while taking a walk or traveling somewhere. Play the program a second time, and you will recall locations (encoded visual memories) directly associated with various parts of the program. These landmarks tend to fade over time, but if emotionally charged at the time of encoding, may become more salient, especially if re...

It's an interesting exercise to reverse-engineer AI-generated music to see what makes it tick, as well enhancing it by playing your own parts against it--a bass part and some synth parts, as well as an orchestral arrangement.   The vocals here are very loose and rubato, with a very human feel--more sprechgesang. But if a human was actually singing this in a band , the phrasing would be much different.  It's interesting how it displaces the melody at random and puts in 2/4 bars.  The "lyrics" I used were just chosen at random from 8/29 entries from my diary, one about the 2004 Republican convention on 8/29/2004 and Hurricane Katrina on 8/29/2005. It's a song about nothing and something at the same time, with just three lines: Looks like 1968 again Category 5 Climate change (Interesting that "Category 5" is 5 syllables) Score:    Category 5 ("The Loop") (Orchestral) by meta4s Full track:   Terrible versions: https://aimusic.fm/music/66d079eb87b4...

Deconstructivist   

 Harlem and Lake    

There are three repeating phrases, played over a span of 4 bars each, then played as a canon. The canon can be played in two ways: 1) as written or playing each pattern as many times as they want. I started with Pattern 1, then began playing them randomly. The player can decide how many bars to play each pattern: group of 9 notes beginning on A, group of 7 notes beginning on D, group of 7 notes beginning on E. What usually happens is once the “mesh” is created, there is no need to count. What you want to avoid are patterns of 4 because it becomes more locked and vertical]. 977 by meta4s

An example of how to use AI in the flow of composition, starting with a black-out lyric, generating the  music, then deriving another piece from the AI musical elements, in this case a classical piece.  The angular harmony is what interested me to want to reverse engineer this. AI music is terrible at harmonic invention, but sometimes you get these kinds of "happy accidents". I put that in quotes because I don't think they're either in this case: firstly, because the harmony is sadly mysterious, and secondly, because I think AI-generated content isn't capable of generating them. The only way I see them happening is if they are synchronistic in some way, where it presents a solution in the moment in the flow of time, just as something happens at the moment of totality.  It's obvious I was using a Pink Floyd vibe.   ***    August 21, 2017 (Eclipse) by meta4s

8/26/2022 Tools are the most basic form of technology, but tools can very often be confused with creativity or obfuscate creativity. The greater the specificity of the genre, the more creativity will be at the service of technology. Certain genres of music have equipment requirements, but in my view, the creativity should be less tool-dependent—unless you start with a particular tool and find materials to use it on.     [8/26/2025: If AI is a tool, it's one that requires no physical effort--it's "motorized"]. 8/26/2023 Thousands of Americans on Saturday commemorated the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, a pivotal event in the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement at which Martin Luther King Jr gave his galvanizing “I have a dream” speech. A sonic memory: Audio Snapshots: Washington DC August 26, 1963 60 years on.

  8/25/2016 Teenagers seem to not like classical music because pop music is inherently more fun and social. In contrast, classical music can be too heady and intellectual. I never liked it as a teenager (or just wasn’t exposed to it), then discovered it in my early 20s through various rock bands/artists that used orchestras on some of their work (Beatles, Led Zeppelin), or directly composed for orchestra, such as Frank Zappa (influenced by Varese, Ives, etc.) It is interesting to note that 1960s pop and rock were actually heavily influenced by jazz and classical, as it was what was played on the radio at the time. In a sense, the “pop” music for a teenager in 1960 was probably jazz, blues, classical, and big band.          8/25/2021        If you think of music as a symmetrical system in which pitches are arranged horizontally (melody) and vertically (harmony) and given different durations (rhythm), then there can be millions of possibil...

8/24/1998 Article by drummer who does jungle grooves. It’s interesting how a new way of working creates new ways of thinking about music—such that new composers want to learn cutting-edge techniques, much in the same way composers in the 17th century wanted to learn about harmony, melody, and counterpoint using the equal-tempered tuning. And the new cut-and-paste techniques are really no less intricate. [8/24/2025. AI is certainly a new way of working. All artists are presented with a new world of creativity. In music, some may have never used any kind of electronic gear or a computer to make music. In 1998, any music magazine was all about gear and using computers. In my view, purity doesn’t go very far as a strategy in itself in terms of creativity being a generative phenomenon. Imagine still recording on a cassette recorder from the 1970s]. “Apathy is probably never good. I think it’s important to go back and see what was important to other generations, but more importantly, your ge...

8/21/2018 "Blue" Sky:                      8/23/2025 Oliver Sacks: "As one's mind becomes preoccupied with theoretical or scientific issues, one may have less attention, time or emotion available for other things. But there are lots of highest-power intellectuals who stay interested in music, like Einstein. Darwin may have been as absorbed in thinking about evolution as Freud was absorbed in thinking about psychoanalysis when he went to operas. All of us are apt to get a little desiccated if we don't make a point of holding on to the delights of art and music and landscape. It's very easy to become preoccupied with theorizing and the activities of daily living and stop noticing the beauties of the world."

8/22/2004 Poetry is in the ear of the beholder. The most successful lyricists understand that while music on its own can be powerful, music married to emotionally charged images and phraseology can have a more lasting impact. But more often it is the trialectic with milestone events in your life that gives power to music, as they more indelibly encode in memory. This makes me think again of the “music of language”. You can say nothing, but say it very well if you put music in the voice. You have to be careful and not just listen to the notes (the surface elements), but to hear the music as well (the entire context). 8/22/2019  Morning Night --ominous storm clouds--Trump Tower: 8/22/2024 AI is still very much in its talking head phase where people don’t know exactly how to use it in an interesting way. What’s interesting to me now is the possibility of creating different artist characters and matching them with styles of music—a character for ambient music, or a character for folk m...

  Strange Days (August 21) by meta4s Remote Control (August 21) by meta4s

8/21/2017 Total eclipse, Columbia, Illinois. Ever since my early Floyd days I had wanted to experience this. It is the most numinous experience to be under the shadow of the looming moon. It’s a 360-degree “sunset”. I only took a few snaps and didn’t want to be distracted.                         8/21/2022  Artificially created work makes for nice prototypes. Sometimes the prototypes can stand alone as art, but it has to function as art, like a readymade. In terms of work, perhaps AI can serve as the artisan, doing the mechanical and repetitive parts, and the Artist can delegate those tasks. But we’ve had that capability since the early days of computers with macros and so on. For art that is more generic, automation could suffice. It’s the art that artists might not want to spend their time on, or they could use the automations as a basis for unique treatments. [8/21/2025: Yesterday, I watched a video of a live performanc...

 Can't Hide Your Tears  

  The black-out idea: The AI had difficulty pronouncing the word "innovationism" at first and garbled it, sometimes making up words like "visionism" or "invasionism" which are both interesting. And not all "ism" words work. It has to be 6 syllables and start on the second beat of the bar. Other variants: A new religilism Indivigilism Winnovationism   ***      The Duds:

8/20/1823  Anne Lister’s journal quoting Rousseau: “I am an enigma even to myself and do excite my own curiosity” 8/20/1998 Interview with Milton Babbitt. He was talking about academics in music and how he hated it. [8/20/2025: As much as I use theory, I’m always wary of getting into jousting matches about it on social media. All domains have their theory and it’s nice shop-talk, but you don’t want to be a theoritician. I’m a parallel octaves scofflaw and who really cares when no one notices it as a listener? It was one of the reasons that I stopped writing songs in the 90s. I wanted it to have no theory, or as Eno says, “leave the music out”. I’ve been putting it back in lately. I might leave it out again in the future. One of the good things about knowing music theory is that you can leave it out for artistic effect, and do something postmodern. I think ambient music is a postmodern phenomenon].      8/20/2016        Jazz seems to be more popula...

Function Before Form (August 19) by meta4s   The Songday "seed":      

 The seed:   The sprout. Will this get used/developed?   Atomic Disease (8-18-1948) by meta4s Atomic Disease (Horn Arrangement) by meta4s

8/17/1999             A better strategy for making a record is to build perpetuity right into it, avoiding dated production. But the paradox is that you have to date your work in order to garner enough fans to inform the pricing of records.             [8/17/2024: All production is eventually dated–especially when music is generated with AI, as those elements are present in the training sets. The only real perpetuity in music is the fact that instruments can always be played manually without software. The monetization of music now comes in the form of what is generated from ads and subscriptions, not people buying records as they did in the 20th century. It is the internet itself that created this paradigm shift because the question has always been how to monetize its content, now made by listeners, not musicians. Music is also elementally about imitation, and generated music removes human imitation and r...

8/16/1968 Studio Two, 14 takes on While My Guitar Gently Weeps.   8/16/1997 20th anniversary of Elvis’ death. 8/16/2022                       There was a photo that was floating around on social media showing Paul McCartney with a capo on the Rick. I can see that he would use it if he wasn’t familiar with certain keys. A bass guitar is a guitar after all, and why not use it?                                       

8/15/1997 The first thing God created was the journey, then he created doubt and nostalgia.                           The AI Treatment:   Black-out poetry/lyric: 8/15/2010                 Field recording : Presidential Park, Oak Park, Illinois. 8/15/2024            When you generate lots of ideas, they are all stylistically different (as they did in the 1960s with auto design), so a cohesive production vibe is difficult. I have resorted to making short demos (as video shorts), that eventually can converge into an album. Initial choices are too difficult to uphold as a strategy when you’re in the middle of making tactical moves. It might have been easier in back in the 2000s. In 2024 the sentiment is that you should be following your joy and if it isn’t a joyous activity you should just drop it, I’ve never agreed with that. It’s just lazy. ...

Every once in a while I'll re-explore a tuning. G5 (D-G-D-G)  is one of my favorites. It begs the question of whether you could get the same ideas in standard tuning, No. Can it replace standard tuning? No. It's also interesting that the tab transposes to standard notation so you can see what's happening musically.  It's essentially an open G tuning. Octaves become ninths, and minor 7ths become octaves.  *** Hence the Title (Bass G5 Tuning) by meta4s

  The Groove. Interesting happy accident with the shaker getting mapped as a cuica.   Sacrifice (August 14) by meta4s

8/14/2005 Still from Sacrifice film shoot at Rosehill Cemetery.   [8/14/2024: Cemeteries have many uses, obviously as film locations and for taking photographs, as well as for the showing of films. Rosehill in Chicago is a popular cemetery for photographers, as is Graceland Cemetery, which I have been to many times, both by myself and with photo groups. It’s not a macabre activity at all, although superstition could color the moment at some point in the future if for example something happened the following day, or on other August 14ths. Of course there is Helen Sclair, the “cemetery lady”].                        8/14/2017 What will 2020’s music sound like? Popular technologies will drive it, and most likely will be shaped with AI, as that seems to now be the cool “guitar” everyone wants. In 1964, this same question was probably asked, and by the end of the 60s, music was vastly different, primarily because of advanc...

8/13/2016 We hate ear worms, but they constitute the “encyclopedia of similarity” that we use to make comparisons. How often is our first response to something new “It reminds me of...”             Somehow I got infected by an ear worm of Turning Japanese by The Vapors the other day out of nowhere. Then later on there was a song playing in a store that sounded just like it. 8/13/2018 Time spent practicing doesn’t necessarily equate with artistic merit. Most rock musicians throughout history only spent enough time to be as good as the musicians they admired, and some went beyond that and became cultural icons. What’s missing now might be soul, and a spiritual feeling in the music. You can’t practice that—you have to develop an inner life first.     I think jazz is a music that is made better the more it is practiced and studied. Musicians who had an interest in jazz, or dabbled in it, usually became better musicians, as its roots are dee...

  Blue Paintings (August 13) by meta4s

A late-60s "period" piece generated by AI. It's amazing how including an organ in a prompt results in this. The part is too rudimentary to be Keith Emerson or Jon Lord. The photo is a self-portrait by Lee Friedlander, probably late 60's so it goes right with it.    In the out-takes, the first track immediately reminded me of early Yes with Tony Kaye on keyboards and Peter Banks om guitar, and before Jon Anderson joined.   ***  It’s only later in your life when you have access to both the side streets and the highways in your life. If you were born in the 1960s and an adolescent in the 70s, those are the side streets of your life. Then there’s the highway of the 1960s.             I didn’t access the highway of the 1960s until the late 1970s, at which time I was “on the road” with the other generations that have been on those roads for a long time, including the highway of the 1950s and 1940s. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that I act...

  Peak Shift (August 12) by meta4s

8/12/2018 Music is “pleasurable” in its capacity to handle both consonance and dissonance in the traditional sense, as well as variations in timbre and texture. We all hear a tritone as being “dissonant” or in a state of suspension that will eventually “fall” into consonance. But that’s too simplistic: since the classical era, music has been redefined and extended in more “artificial” ways, such as electronic music or remix, that has nothing to do with whether something is consonant or dissonant for the purpose of somehow “resolving” it. A tritone or a minor second can be used in isolation without resolution as they are in rock and jazz for example. Personally, I think tension-release is more universal than consonant-dissonant, as it can include other things besides harmony, such as making things sonically dense, then quickly contrasting it. 8/12/2021 Recently, there was a study done that showed that if musicians released more music they would become more recognized. There were two cat...