Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

Voice is of Elisis Livingston of the Shambala retreat in Glastonbury. She was a subject in the documentary by Richard Dawkins titled Enemies of Reason . Music is mine, which I remixed to feature her voice. It is more of a parody than a tribute to her spiritual vision, but there is a certain power in her voice in context with the music, and I like how one affects the other.   The "lyric": We come here to move through time and through space Allow the eyes to gently close Smile a very best smile Swallow the smile, with some saliva  into the heart And let the heart smile back at you And there's a warm and a welcoming feeling Joy without end Grace, beauty, laughter Deep knowing of the wise being that you are And the golden glow that comes from the heart Comes from a golden flower And use the gold light from the centre of the flower like a sunbeam And beam it onto those petals And wake them up There is a second part that's very personal And this is to step inside the pearl ...

 AI Music is causing daily cognitive dissonance because I'm not sure it's art writ large. If there were a visual equivalent, it would be a prefab collage with some overpainting created by the lyrics and the prompt script. The results are interesting, and you like them on your wall as decoration. I'm not sure how it could be recontextualized or appropriated because it would force the hacking of something admired for its decorative qualities. For it to be art, you'd have to channel Ai Weiwei in some way, like the dropping of Han Dynasty urns, but those urns would rather be cheap replicas. Some people actually like the urns and have sentimental value, even though they are inexpensive. Some AI music can gather those kinds of feelings if there is some kind of emotional connection with a loved one, or associated with a time or place. There are songs I generated that evoke places where I was when I was working on the lyrics. They are my "musical daydreams" that are p...

 

One of the interesting things about keeping a diary—especially electronic diaries—is that you can compile a lot of information. I've been keeping an Evernote diary since 2009. In the beginning, I just saved articles to it to read later, and now it's become encyclopedic in some ways. It's my personal internet. A while back I was thinking about nudges. (There was a book that came out in 2013 by Cass Sunstein titled Nudge ). I had a note in my diary about doing a piece on it and then I ran a search in Evernote and I have articles going back to 2010 talking about nudging—especially nudging with technology using notifications and algorithms.  What's remarkable about digital text is that you can amass a lot of it and you can go back and do searches and then collect that information and shape it again in a recursive process, which is interesting because our minds are naturally recursive in some ways—continually connecting to something else—winnowing it down—-a narrowing. Last ...

 Amazing what you can do with just MIDI output.  

 

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 story line, 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 viewers 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.  [10/19/2026: This is exactly what's happening in the film (or documentary withi...

  *** AI Treatment:

  AI Treatment:

I still haven't decided what I find interesting about AI music or if it's Art per se. Users are attempting it but it will never be art you made entirely by yourself. I write the lyrics--or appropriate other sources, but I didn't write the music or play on it. (You can say you were the "producer" to some degree) As to appropriation, you can make a lyric out of anything--in this case, a section for the book Useless Etymology. "The word and abbreviation “OK” most likely came about as a result of... well, nerds being silly. (Not that anyone reading or writing this book can judge.) Although several other theories have arisen, the predominant theory revolves around the fact that, in the 1830s, collegiate jokesters in Boston and New York came up with a series of slang abbreviations based on deliberately misspelled words." k.g. was short for “kno go” (no go) n.c. was short for “nuff ced” (enough said) k.y. was short for “know yuse” (no use) o.k. was short for “o...

  Released 15 years ago. A few AI versions. Theses aren't bad actually, and is a machine improvising based on the original recordings, picking up on the head, 

  Released 20 years ago about a dystopian world in the future, now with AI treatments. This could have been how it sounded. I was still using a drum-and-bass vibe, even 10 years after it first emerged.   In retrospect, it's now become a Sci-Fi trilogy with Miles From Mars and 2046 . ***

 A 90s prog tune with AI treatment. Lyrics by Pat Gardner.  

 Along Milwaukee   

 AI-generated based on a 2011 song conceived in an open G Minor tuning. All minor chords.  Score:

What was great about pre-20th century creativity was that the pace of technology was slow or even nonexistent. Things simply stayed the same all the time and was a stable environment for creating things—we didn’t feel like we had to be on the bandwagon about everything—have the Medium and the Substack, the Twitter following, and so on. All you need are the basic materials and perhaps a standardization of thinking. I know that has overtones of totalitarianism but what you want to do is to slow down enough to where you can work on one thing for several hours. In my experience, just warming up the creative process can take 3 hours, before anything gets racked up as being creative. In Beethoven’s time, people made things without technological change. Everything was local, and you had a stable atmosphere for creative work. I think we can still go back to something like that: where you have strictly local “sceniuses”. That’s probably hard to do now because things are all online and local com...

How AI interpreted old jazz works and ambient music. Splat was on Miles From Mars, a  quirky piece inspired by Stravinsky and Egyptian composer Mohammed Abdel Wahab. Woman From Mercury was inspired by Klezmer and Bulgarian Wedding music.

Filters in the wild: Reflections off transparent tinted mirrors   

 

Back in the early 1990s, I was a fanatic for world music, and for a while, I ran a world music mail-order company called Intersect Music . It had several sections for different regions from around the world. It's now interesting to think about all that music in context with what's happened since the early 90s and through the end of the century: Rodney King, the first World Trade Center attack, Waco, the OJ trial, the Oklahoma City bombing, and so on. They were events that you watched on TV for hours and hours, all of which for me were in the background and were all unnerving--something I had never experienced before. For boomers, there was a palpable shift. What was particularly interesting to me was to think about how music can or can't be used--especially music that comes from Islamic countries. I always liked the music just for the music but there's there's a subtext that I have since realized--certainly post-9/11--that music can exist on its own and you could us...

   Seed:    

   AI Treatment:  

  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.