Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

One of the first drafts of what might become Sum V: Curios , with pieces less than a minute long, each with an accompanying Short. Classical music for short attention spans--and no AI. Curio No. __ (9/12) by meta4s

9/30/1997             Roy Lichtenstein died. His use of ads, cartoons, etc. is similar to using samples in music. Music is really mimicking what happens in the art world, but with a long lag time.     9/30/1998             Surfed the Net on collaborative information filtering idea. Lots of great links: The Game of Life, the “Serendip” page. Must revisit.  [9/30/2024: This was the beginning of what we now know as simply an “algorithm”—the black box that defines the world we experience online, and now in life in general because it is recommending our relationships and how we navigate them. It has not been good for society or democracy because it is about collectivism as opposed to community. Viktor Frankl: “Only the community can ensure the meaning of individuality for the individuals…only the safeguarding of individuality for the individuals can ensure the meaning of community. This is what distingu...

9/29/2024                         If music is too much about emotion, it will never go in a different direction. It’s too hard to reinvent.     ***             Watched some footage from the David Gilmour Luck and Strange tour, specifically Great Gig In the Sky, where in place of the vocal improv by Clare Tory, they had a female vocal ensemble based on it–essentially a “scored” piece. It’s interesting that something spontaneous can later be arranged and played as if it was through-composed. This has happened to me many times where I’ll be playing something in a track as an improvisation and then later go back and actually score it for strings, even if it’s something musical in a field recording. Similar riffs happen in culture as well, where you take some cultural or historical element and spin it into something else that takes on secondary meanings... [9/29/2025. There was ...

9/28/2010  One thing instrumentalists understand is touch and feeling. [ Musing on Music LLM : “Discuss tactility in music”]     9/28/2019 Primary creative “access points” can sometimes lead toward more shallow depths of superficial interest, with no continued exploration of the ideas. Ideally what you should want is to follow through the various waypoints, even if how you began was clumsy or naive.  Creativity can have these kinds of “desire paths” but you have to have the desire to make them, or else you’re going around in the same circles thinking the scenery is somehow different, or that where you’ve come to a dead end.             There are departures but never complete arrivals in creativity.             [9/28/2024: Even though it’s a rare experience, I love it when the final result resembles the initial stages and access points. I’m reminded of Stephen Sondheim, who certainly didn’t fol...

9/27/2018             I’ve kept an idea list for as long as I can remember. The funny thing is that I tend to work on things that are in-progress or are a part of a series, which may or may not have been from the list. While I’m working, I will take the time to explore ideas as they arise, which get added to the list.     9/27/2021                        Finally reading one of Neil Peart’s books, Roadshow about their 2004 tour. I liked the bit about “tryism”. I tried the “trying not to try” (wu wei) and never got anything done and never led anywhere interesting. Even if you simply coast to the next destination, you find yourself trying something during the day, regardless of whether it’s creative or not. What I find remarkable about him is how he can be both intellectual and also do the hard work of playing shows every day for six months. I always thought it was about compa...

    This is kind of a silly thing based on an auction barker, an isometric rhythm where a lyric schema can be mapped over it. Each word in brackets can be swapped out with any word one through ten, omitting seven because it has two syllables and is not isometric. Perhaps an algorithm could be written that would do this in an LLM: [One] dollar bid now [two] now [two] will you give me [two] [Two] dollar bid now [three] now [three] will you give me [three] [Three] dollar bid now [four] now [four] will you give me [four] [Four] dollar bid now [five] now [five] will you give me [five] [Five] dollar bid now [six] now [six] will you give me [six] [Eight] dollar bid now [nine] now [nine] will you give me [nine] [Nine] dollar bid now [ten] now [ten] will you give me [ten] Possible Groove: Barker by meta4s Some Silly AI Versions:

9/25/1999             On the future of music listening: Now that we have the capability to compile songs and make our own collections, we need to weed out all this similar-sounding material: “Techno with samples of monks—already have one of those”. This will put the onus on the composers to come up with new and exciting material that will stand the test of time.             [9/25/2024: I realized at popular tourist locations millions (or perhaps billions) of people take pictures of the same things, and I had the idea for a camera app that would automatically delete photos that had already been taken, or would apply an effect of some kind to make them different. This is probably very easy now with AI. But the current data sets are full of cliches and they would all be removed if you made the instruction to do so.] [9/25/2025: If you generate a song with your words, then replace the words, and use those words to re-gene...

9/24/1999             Prediction: by 2020, the pop music world will experience a Singularity. If one uses the rule that cultural revolutions occur every 20 years, in 2020 will be using all recycled music. There will be no innovation, just digital remnants. Very few people will want to play an instrument.             [9/24/2024: A pretty good prediction @25. By 2049 there will be things we’re doing now that people will no longer be doing]. [9/24/2025: Those “digital remnants” are the training sets that AI music uses].  9/24/2005 Watched Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan. Things I liked: he talked about the “sound” and how it compelled him to pursue music, “the sound” meaning the intrinsic, 4th dimension qualities; A musical “expedition”; an artist has to be careful to never arrive at a place where he thinks he’s somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming... 9/24/2017...

 

Interesting: When I passed the Potbelly on Lake, one of the tables had an array of Hispanic theological and religious paperbacks (as a revival of “The Book Table”?) The one I’d be interested in is The Secret Holy War of Santiago de Chile, apparently published in 1989 just when Chile was in recovery from the coup. What caught my eye was that someone decided to display these in Oak Park, the gesture of it, as a “wink” of what is happening in the US.   

9/23/2001 In music, what we need now are challenges, not cultural fluff. [9/23/2025: Immediately after 9/11 people were re-thinking their lives, as we did post-COVID. It’s as if they were clues to the next move. But we can go wrong if we change direction just because everyone is doing the wave. In 2001, I personally didn’t change direction as if turning over a new leaf. Metamodernism was just beginning to be discussed]. 9/23/2017 Jimi Hendrix didn’t operate at the level of skill. His contribution to the instrument was more driven by the time in which he lived, and the extra-musical sounds that the instrument could make. Perhaps if he had lived, future albums may have focused more on musicianship, but given his popularity, would he have pursued it for the sake of the art form? Perhaps.             [9/23/2025: Knowing when to use skill is a skill] 9/23/2019             Chicago-henge:         ...

 On the other side of the year 9/22/1995  For the Fall Equinox: 9/22/2017 “Soulful” or any other words or concepts attached to human emotions can possibly be built into machines, but it begs the question why. I have been attempting to compose piano pieces with algorithms and I still can’t answer the Whys. I prefer playing them myself because Soul is built in.  [9/22/2025: The latest foray into AI-generated songwriting is an experiment with Esperanto translations of some of my 90s lyrics. If you were to do this manually 30 years ago you'd have to find someone to translate them, then write melodies. Since I don't speak the language (does anyone?), it would be impossible to sit down with an instrument and sing against it. AI can do that, but it's a soul-less mechanical process--something I sometimes find hollow and creepy. The music itself works as a kind of addicting confection which hides the fact that the sugar isn't good for you. The translations are also clum...

 AI-analysis of all the entries that contain the word "jazz" or "blues". (See description for notes)

On the other side of the year 9/21/1998 Reading Umberto Eco essay on analysis of the cult status of Casablanca. He said the movie was an aggregation of lots of different elements—a movie made of other movies.             [This is intertextuality–what LLMs now are. If we used LLMs exclusively, everything would be derived from something else, not arising from ideas that humans have. But even then, many ideas have already been thought of. Google resolved that 25 years ago, where you could look up something to see if it had already been done.]               9/21/2009 Went to performance of Turkish military ensemble at Millennium Park. I don’t know why but I have an affinity for Turkish folk song and Taqsim—almost a form of jazz riffing, but at the same time ritualistic and devotional. On Van Buren at Wells, there’s this seedy tavern (Cal’s), and in one of the windows they made this strange “shrine” with a broken gui...

9/19/2005 Interview with Steve Reich on NPR. He was talking about “ voicetruments ”.  9/19/2012 Dynaxiom idea: To a large degree, the power of music is to compel you to listen to something repeatedly. [9/19/2025: Saturation is the key, but that saturation involves “soaking” which I think is about 3 times listening to something. As a writer and producer you are marinating in music, which can be an over-saturation]      9/19/2024 Idea: Frame this: 1600. Aphorisms are words in a frame.    And so it is...  

9/18/1993 Guy in subway playing a Turkish instrument–looks like a banjo, played like an oud. Had a formica fingerboard and a body about 6 inches deep made out of metal. Don’t know the tuning, 12 strings. This is what it is: 9/18/1999 At some point in the next 50 years, musicians will have to create music from scratch rather than create music based on just digital remnants, or new music will be based only on the surviving remnants, i.e. those that still physically exist in a medium that is still playable, and have stood the test of time in a cultural sense. (For example, Beatles recordings are likely to exist, but might not be part of the musical landscape, or become esoteric museum pieces.)  [9/18/2024: At 25 years, even non-musicians are generating music from digital remnants that we now know as LLMs and data sets. Music started to become more about playing recordings rather than instruments around 2000–two years before this entry. I recall at the time Sony had released the Acid...

 9/17/2004  Woman killed by falling cross in Rome. “Instant Karma’s going to get you...” As a riff. Any prose can be made musical by making it musical   Interesting cross-discipline metaphor, blurring of boundaries between arts: “that’s how I push myself in my jazz solos—I want to see if I can get out alive on the other side.”             [The current sentiment is that AI will never be able to improvise jazz. I think it will be possible given that soloing is about a linear flow of randomly-accessed ideas. But what is different about improvisation by humans is that the ideas are being strategically planned in the background as a kind of “buffering”. Our neurons are firing a split-second before we actually make an action, and computers obviously can buffer well. Will they be master improvisers? No, but they might make an interesting counterpoint duet].     9/17/2021      Music heard in a dream. I played it for...

9/16/2001             While listening to music on the radio, you get these very interesting coincidences, or “collisions of context”. You’d be listening to a report about an Islamic holy war, change the dial to a rock station and hear Lennon’s “Instant Karma”, followed by Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down”—I’ll stand my ground. (Prediction: song lyrics will become more important. Songwriters will also have to censor their own work.)             [9/16/2025: Lyrics are now hugely important in AI generation because their musicality will drive the overall musicality. They also anonymize the voice in the sense that a marionette is singing them].    9/16/2004  One of the wonders of digitized information is that you can endlessly edit it. It is possible to scan the original documents typed on a typewriter, convert it to text, edit the text, then make another original. These could be merely proxies of the vir...

9/15/1981             Death of Bill Evans. A dedication by Metheny/Mays. [9/15/2025: A piece I would cite as being emotional and elegiac. in the same way Barber's Adagio For Strings is, a bit maudlin at times., yet sincere].  9/15/1998 Every new technology creates new paradigms of thinking and spawns new kinds of art and ways of creating art. As Kevin Kelly says, “revolutions take place in what we make, how we make it, how we decide what to make in the nature of the economy that we make it in.”             [9/15/2024: I have begun to use AI in my work, which is my choice, not one that has been foisted on me. I take parts that I like and leave the rest. When there is so much pressure for ratings and popularity, we reflexively move toward it and perhaps away from those things that are “of a piece” with our own lives, with an eye on “the nature of the economy that we make it in.”] [9/15/2025: Why Do We Stop? ] ...

  This is the companion blog to Musing On Music Mostly , based on an LLM based on it . Possible Queries: Discuss the purpose of music Discuss musing versus music Discuss free will in music  Discuss world music Discuss dance and dancing Discuss the purpose of art Discuss how architecture informs creativity What are their views on artificial intelligence or AI? What are their views on AI Music? What are their views on jazz? Discuss composition procedures and strategies Discuss Pink Floyd Discuss the connection between music and language Discuss David Bowie's philosophies on music and creativity Discuss Brian Eno's philosophies on music and creativity Discuss music and spirituality Discuss use of systems and constraints in creativity Explain the differences between modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism What are the 4 Levels of creativity? Discuss ambient music Discuss improvisation Discuss the use of alternate tunings Discuss lyrics Discuss the use of series and frameworks ...

9/14/2004             Idea: a photo blog.     9/14/2011             It is seldom the case that ideas continue to belong to the progenitor. And why would we want them to? Beethoven might be considered a person whose ideas were epochal, but he was merely following the rule book or ‘Best Practices’ of composition, built on compositional methods blazed by Mozart and his elders. After Beethoven died, his music endured, and the supporting theories continue to be used to this day. What did die was the classical style. Similarly, the ideas behind Apple products may continue to exist in theory, but the new company may be as different as the Beethoven symphonies and the Beatles’ Abbey Road, similar in some musicological sense, but vastly different culturally.             If music history is a guide, the core ideas engendered corporeally, will most likely not endure ethereally....

  13th History Overlay  9/13/1998             The musician converts mental states into a pattern that evokes the same (or different) mental states in the listener. If we want to understand the Beatles, we have to concentrate on what led to that sound, the distillation of spirit and inspiration, which eventually results in sound that listeners hear and convert to exformation.             German physicist Peter Richter said that in his studies of chaos theory and fractals he came to the analysis that people tend to be drawn to boundaries, coasts, rivers, mountain chains...Because they are transitions from one element to another. “The beauty of boundaries comes about because it is a place where something complicated and interesting happens. If we are in only one domain, our lives are not as interesting as they would be if we lived on the boundary, where we can be influenced by many different things. I like the ...

 

  A Photographs For Music video (and Music For Places ) using the controversial photo taken in Konskie Poland in September 12, 1939 showing a distraught Leni Riefenstahl, wearing a military uniform, ostensibly reacting to the execution of civilians after a scuffle with police. But we don't know the full context.    9/12/2005         Idea: Analysis of song lyrics from 1900-2000 showing how ideas of love, suffering, and social commentary were treated in song lyrics. [9/12/2025: Definitely an interesting use of AI ( Perplexity.ai )  9/12/2022 There used to be a philosophy that being able to compose was only possible once the musician’s skills had matured. I never understood it because as skills develop you can use them compositionally. Once you know all the major scales and know the relative minors, and perhaps the modes, you can use them to build something. The musician might stop with the skills but the artist proceeds to shape something orig...

9/11/1968           John’s song for those despised people who dissected his lyrics for hidden - but almost always unintended - revelations and conundrums. One of two songs on The Beatles to give mention in its lyric to another Beatles song title (“Savoy Truffle” mentioned “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”), “Glass Onion” is peppered with references to the Beatles” recent output: “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “I Am The Walrus”, “Lady Madonna”, “The Fool On The Hill” and “Fixing A Hole”. John also tossed in what may seem a cryptic line, about the “Cast Iron Shore”. This is a real place in Liverpool. [9/11/2025: Many of the lyrics that I’ve written for the Songday series are very much in the John Lennon vein. He was very much into cryptic lyrics and word play–much more than Paul McCartney. This was probably a Yoko Ono influence and Fluxus and Dada indirectly. The technique of the constructed or abstracted lyric is either a form of cut-up or bibliomancy , a form of divinatio...

 

9/10/1997             Watched program about I.M. Pei and Phillip Johnson.  Some interesting quotes by Pei:             The durability and the essence of things is the only thing that can last, otherwise, it’s transitory fashion; If you are true to yourself, your signature will come out; Once you’ve found the heart of the piece, then you have to make it work; The simpler the solution, the more powerful it is. [Works as a poem. Sometime prose and poetry meet perfectly. But lyrics are harder. Very seldom is prose singable as a song. An art song perhaps--but not a pop song]. The durability And the essence of things Is the only thing That can last– Otherwise, it’s transitory fashion If you are true to yourself And once you’ve found the heart  Your signature will come out– The simpler the solution The more powerful it is     A possible orchestral treatment: 9/10/2022 What is interesting about world music...

[Now with AI I would imagine it would be much easier to set up a correlation between live weather data with a fully-produced track. But I've found that moods used in prompts seldom have any real effect on the results. My idea was about generating ambient music, not a fast-tempo EDM track on a sunny day. History of Koan ]. 9/9/2005 Thousands of NOLA residents are migrating to other US cities—how will it re-shape American culture? (Music will migrate as well).     [9/9/2025: Does music still have a sense of place? I would argue that it doesn’t, mostly because boundaries changed or faded with the internet. Now that you can generate World Music with AI it may sound like it’s from Senegal or Ethiopia because they’ve scraped the recordings of Yousou N'Dour and Malatu Astatke. AI music is by no one from nowhere].  9/9/2017             Music performance allows one to be intimately involved with the passing of time, although listening to mus...