Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

 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:  

 

   AI treatment: 

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

      AI spins: 

  Seed:    

 Seed:    AI treatments:

  Inequality   

    A 1986 jazz head with AI treatment. It's the first time this has ever been performed after 40 years.  

  AI Treatment: 

  Ralph Meatyard - Untitled (1964)     AI treatment: 

A harmonic etude of ii-I-Vs through the circle of 4ths. The complete cycle modulating up in 4ths through all 12 keys: D-/C/G G-/F/C C-/Bb/F F-/Eb/Bb Bb-/Ab/Eb Eb-/Db/Ab G#-/F#/C# C#-/B/F# F#-/E/B B-/A/E E-/D/A A-/G/D    

 Caustics  

 Interstitial  

  Summer is a plain A plateau of life Everything in full bloom In the maximum light The sun made marks On a window sill The angle changed It caused a chill The summer leaves The flowers a clock Antipode to a country road On the other side of the year If you play a movie backwards It won't end up as it started It tells a different story To follow it is harder It's that time of year You notice the night A fading of light Disappearing from sight Take a turn With the calendar birds Hope to see you near On the other side of the year A time for reading novels Obscured by clouds Seasonal tales Never read aloud Tilt and rotation Light/dark shift Shadows of the day Shift and drift The summer leaves The flowers a clock Antipode to a country road On the other side of the year   ***  My pics: Speedo, Alibi, Vapor Cone

  Seed is the phrase " hunting ghosts in broad daylight", from this AI-generated diary entry by Thomas Sullivan, a fictitious character living in Chicago in 1886. So it goes from AI to human back to AI in the AI versions.   8/5/1886 I find myself hunting ghosts in broad daylight. Yesterday, wandering near where Miller’s store once stood, I searched for some trace of the black bunting from Lincoln’s mourning. Nothing. Glass and granite have consumed every landmark of my younger self. Time moves differently now—not the urgent acceleration I felt in ‘75, but a strange compression. Decades telescope into moments. I remember the weight of thirty years like yesterday’s coat, yet cannot recall what I ate for breakfast. AI Versions:

I still think AI music is in its talking head stage; we really don’t know what to do with it. It usually takes about 10 years for a new technology to get its sea legs. Eventually, lots of people will be using it legitimately, unless the courts decide otherwise. In the meantime, there's going to be a lot of smaller shifts that will increase the options, such as choosing keys and meters. If there was an option to create a song in 5/8 or 7/8 it would be interesting to see what it does with language. Would people generate prog? Perhaps. Would you subscribe to Rush AI for $50 a month?

  Cindy Sherman--Untitled #90 AI music gives you many options on what you can do with language. You'd never get a singer who would be willing to sing a lyric that was just a hold menu, and do it in 6 languages, including Esperanto.  Now that so many people are using AI-generators, the possibility of the same music accompanying different lyrics is more probable. So you have to attempt something different.  (The second verses switch languages: English in Spanish, Spanish in French, French in German, German in Italian, Italian in Esperanto)

 

It's at this time of year that you begin noticing a change in the light. In the Northern Hemisphere, the mornings are darkening and twilight comes earlier. Summer is a "plain" or "plateau" of anticipation: everything is in full bloom, and the leaves won't be changing for another 2 months, the days begin to get perceptibly shorter towards the end of July. But in March, there's an anticipation of Spring, and by the end of May, the anticipation of summer. September is a feeling of heading back down the hill.   Changing of Light, Sun, and Moon 0179: Compares poetry to the moon rather than the sun , as it " reflects light rather than shines directly " . 0352: States that " Light never ages; it just travels farther " . 0522: Reflects on the " earthrise " captured during the 1969 moon landing as a compelling moment of perspective . 0570: Observes that looking at the sun makes one realize it is the force that " created yo...

  Sunken Bridge by RO&AD Worth re-posting. I haven't tested the links so some may be dead.   7/30/2011 At the theoretical level, song hooks are imbued with clever twists like harmonic modulations, chord 'borrowing' and turnarounds. Now these devices have devolved from the songwriter's toolkit in much the same way Cole Porter Moon-June rhyming schemes became obsolete by the 1960s in favor of new compositional devices that made them frumpy and old hat. The classic bridge is now in this category. Nonetheless I still love to put them in songs. Bridges (sometimes used synonymously with middle-eight ) are difficult to do well because not any musical transition can qualify as a bridge device. They typically appear only once in a composition: If a section is repeated, it technically is not a bridge. Some regard the "life is very short..." phrase in the Beatles' "We Can Work It Out" or the "why she had to go..." phrase in "Yesterday...

It's interesting to trace the evolution of a piece of music born 32 years ago, from the acoustic version to an AI  interpretation in 2026.  ***  In the eyes of a child The reflection of a mother's care Father so silent Yet so heartfully there A country's border There to keep out the danger There to cast out the strangers That storm the gates of heaven When there comes a time A babe needs your hand Open your arms and then Give them your land When they've come to conquer Your fortress so lame Infants will scream louder 'Til the bedside she came A light shines from her window Silhouette dance with impassioned grace We all seek the comfort In the bosom of her border Like war-weary men Their desire like the battlefield Are drawn into her light The salve to soothe their pain *** Ladies full-throttled Packaged and bottled For love we coddle In the babe's lonesome room Sweet handmaiden waddle Nightingale Street toddle Bedside manner lens Its eyes never staid Visions an...

    A string shortet based on an AI version of Hot New Earth . It's an interesting evolution: Original pop song>AI treatment>transcription>AI treatments. The string quartets have nothing to do with the original song but is its parentage. An AI versions of the AI version.  No. 1:   No. 2:

  It's interesting to re-imagine old lyrics with AI with fake band names. Feel free to use the names, but you'll have the same band playing different music, which might be interesting in the AI realm. [Hot New Earth 1997]  Visionary art  Culture create Useful technology  What cannot be made? Weaving the cloth That keeps us warm Leaving the land So trashed and worn The balance of soul To the roots in the land To the gothic cathedrals Where the masses band The song and the dance Of the social norm Is now the slam dunk Of the antisocial porn  In a hot new earth In a cold cold sweat Hot new earth Meets a cold cold death Force times velocity Will give us power In a hot new...  Earth Overrated human The master of slaves Never the spiritual Just material craves A culture to integrate The math with the art The choice (joy) to be ignorant And not to be smart The removal of skin The raising of the sea Take away the trees The means for recovery Poison pills For a feve...

The blackout poetry version and a nice juxtaposition of entries--from real life to "reel" life, the world of Anne Frank and the world of Marilyn Monroe. Inge Morath was the set photographer for the film The Misfits .      AI Version:   

 

Ice Core Layers 2010 was the first year that I got my first pair of ear mics and a portable recorder. What I was most interested in was finding places that had embedded Keynotes or Soundmarks (continuous pitched elements in a place) which I wanted to integrate into my ambient music. Field recordings are actually a great way to listen to the environment because the recording apparatus has done some of that listening for you: when you come back and listen to the recording, you hear things that you missed when you were there. It works the same way in photography, where you come back home and look at the images and you see other things that were outside the frame that you didn't notice when you were attempting to get the shot. Even before I was doing field recording myself, I was interested in using field recordings made by others. I had a friend that visited various parts of the globe, one of them Costa Rica. I had taken his field recordings and made an immersive sound environment to ...