Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

  Written in 1994, several years after the fall of the wall. I was still thinking that even when the wall came down, there was still what the Germans call “The wall in the head”, a "curtain". ***  In a perfect world We can have no walls But we hide behind a curtain In a restless world A government falls And leaves our futures quite uncertain In a modern world We should draw no lines But our lives are framed in fear In a peaceful world There can be no war But the enemies are always near In an ancient world The earth is flat and worn But the rocks are never too old to roll In a simple world The past is etched in symbols upon a stone But the future's always made of gold The West has lost its rival And the bureaucrats are dead But the circumstance we face Is just a different shade of red

(Pictures of the TV)  

A song (sorta) about Millerism From the book The Conspiracists : "The Ballards said that Saint Germain wanted them to deliver his messages to the public. The I AM movement, which is currently making a big comeback, spawned other groups that borrowed its traditions to build their own new theologies. The most influential of these was Elizabeth Clare Prophet, a woman who ran a version of I AM in the 1960s through to the 1990s that was closely aligned with far-right politics and preached an impending apocalypse based in nuclear Armageddon." The world will end On September 31st Caught between The 29ths and the 1sts Read between the lines The lines in a verse Cosmic signs To be read in reverse A new age will begin Third dimension to the fifth You'll begin to feel The shift and the drift Living life force Not an off-planet man Mystical laws Not a guy with a plan The world will end On November 31st Caught between The 29ths and the 1sts Read between the lines The lines in a verse ...

 Seed from found sound:         Curio No. 49 by meta4s AI Versions:

My first AI jazz album using digitized cassette demos from the late 80s and early 90s. Most of it was never performed. or if it was, the performances were mediocre and not recorded well. The "restorations" are akin to the restorations of old films or recordings on 78s.  The model (v4.5) sounds less than optimal (and better than v6), and interestingly has a warbly cassette sound, so it inherits the imperfections of the medium. The corollary with vinyl would be that the restorations would include crackles and pops. The lo-fi quality actually gives it a faux-retro sound, or the sound of a live recording where the tape had degraded. To do restorations in a more musical way, you would let Suno create provisional versions from digitized tape, then transcribe them in some form to a MIDI file, and then use the audio file from that to create the final.  Be Bach : The original recording was me playing the bass melody, but the horns play it on the AI gen. Suno filled out the arrangement...

 

  Untitled

  Became a soft ambient song. AI shortens the time from initial spark to mastered recording. 

 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...

 

  Stills of Strange Days (1995) and Metropolis *** AI Gens:  Seed:  

 

  Hans Namath photo of Jackson Pollock over Rubens' The Death of Decius Mus   AI Gens:

 It's amazing what you can do with just a rap into a phone with just a scribbled idea.                                        

A jazz head comprised of altered V-I cadences moving up in 4ths, using the raised 4th/11th as the altered note. They can be played as polychords (A/G, D/C, etc.) in a group situation, where the keyboards play the bottom triad and guitars play the top triad. Chord scales would be Lydian and Lyxian (a hybrid of Lydian and Mixolydian), or pentatonics.  Play at Musecore AI version, almost how it would sound with horns, I can't attest if it's following the changes, but the piece is such that attempting to play it might sound interesting, focusing on the what's in front of the slash, while the bass plays what's behind it--maybe the fifth

The Babylonian Marriage Market -- Edwin Long + Still from the Babylon film   Seed:   

 

  A cheesy cutout album you found for 50 cents recorded circa 1973. Amazing that a drummer finally was able to play it.  

 

 AI-generated.    

A "Mingused" blues, harmonizing a blues scale with extended chords. Amazing how good the AI spins are, even with the free model. It has a hard time sussing the chords, but then learns them.  

    The rhythmic grouping of eighth-quarter-eighth (or quarter-eighth-eighth or eighth-eighth-quarter) beginning on a downbeat is one of the most common speech rhythms, probably in any language. Displacing them an eighth note in either direction makes the words unintelligible ("ships arrive" becomes "ships A-rrive", "jumbo jet" becomes "jumBO jet"), but there are other words that could be mapped to that rhythm, e.g. "container". Obviously it doesn't matter in instrumental music, but speech rhythms can become rhythmic building blocks. Some words with the 8-4-8 (or 8-8-4) schema: Ships arrive Walk the streets In my youth Got around Thinking that Better than Still alive

  Slippery Slope , based on Dynaxiom 2878. The vibe is Barrett-era Floyd with the characteristic descending chromatic lines. *** How Suno spins it:    

I have always worked combinatorially, i.e., each creative act is somehow connected to others, either spontaneously (when I am aware of them) or later when I associate them with existing works. This works the same for my music as well as art projects. I also have always kept lists of ideas, titles, strategies, and so on, which I go back to very often. Electronic notebooks, such as Evernote have made this easier (perhaps too easy), but I used to keep paper journals and sketchbooks. There are two basic ways to add cohesion to creativity: 1) create the work then serialize; 2) create similar pieces in an existing series. This also works in music where you can compose first, then add to a collection (album) or define the framework for the album and fill it in accordingly. I don’t think there’s anything that I do, either through design methodologies, or through improvisation that doesn’t fit with something I’ve done before. I know there are some artists who like to make something they’ve neve...

 From Islamic Design: A Genius For Geometry      

  5/8 Delta Blues     

  Buncheong

Typically I would have transcribed a sax solo and attempt to play it on the bass. In this case I paraphrased a Bach Partita in a Be Bop style and for the bass, but this is a sax version of the head played on the bass.   

 

 The birthplace of Picasso. AI version:

 Approximately 1991. AI adds a horn arrangement that I never conceived of at the time.   

 Sunlight dapple on the TV screen  

  AI slop, but not bad.  Score

Juxtaposed lines: 8/23/1963, Friday  Single release, “She Loves You”.  8/23/1995  (Eno Diary)  New Oblique Strategy: “When is it for? Who is it for?” *** It's interesting that when I uploaded the riff Suno flagged it because "She loves you" was in it. Now with LLMs in the loop of music, a band can own words. I used "she loves you" in a riff and Suno flagged it. The Beatles now own those words such that you could be pulled over for using it in a conversation.  So why make anything, especially it it involves days or weeks of work? Why not just copyright a color ?   

    Curio No. 62A by meta4s

 

 I’ve always been restless and eclectic. I never really stick with one thing for very long. It’s not that I lose interest and never want to do it again; it’s just that there are too many other things to explore. You could say that it’s kind of impulsive and that I’m not thinking things through, but as an artist, I don’t think it would be very enjoyable or interesting to want to stick to one thing. There are artists who have only done one thing, and I admire their work. The artist I always cite is Peter Halley , who’s done essentially the same piece his entire career. I know lately he’s been doing other things, and there have been other singularly focused artists who have branched out. But I’m different because I do lots of different things and alternate between them, sometimes doing them all simultaneously. Over the past 5 or 10 years, I’ve kind of returned to skill, having spent quite a bit of time doing things that are more abstract and postmodern, which don’t involve a lot of sk...

    Black-out lyric idea: 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.

(Pictures of the TV)  

  Charles Sheeler - Industrial Study No. 2, 1935   8/19/2024  Abstracted lines from 8/19 diary entries: Function before form Start with a basic sound Think that they were art Looking at them close and far Roman or Egyptian art Brightly-colored African art Going back to nature Going back to the roots   ***  Orchestral:  8/19/2026 (AI Version):

8/18/1948 (Jack Kerouac Journal--paraphrased) Jack goes to New York with Tom, jazz club for bop, smoked pot, and pondered epigonism [an imitation of an artist by a subsequent generation], existence of “atomic disease”: “There is something definitely afoot, a madness, one not unlike the late Roman cult-madnesses.”                                   Run through AI:  Extrapolated lyric: Took off for New York Went out with his other girl Enemy of the bourgeois Back to the windblown world Madness of a Roman cult Shadow of the bomb Fell to your knees From atomic disease Jazz club for bop Smoked a lot Pondered beat religion Go back to Kerouac Back to the windblown world Addicted to the city Intellectual juice The splitting of the atom Electrons on the loose Survival paranoia Post-nuclear rage Despair in France The existential age The haunting sound of a breathless saxophone It comes around when you'r...

 

   AI treatment: 

 If you can't attend an Eclipse you can always take pictures of the TV (Hipstamatic)     

      AI spins: 

  Seed: