Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

Sometimes AI comes up with very nice melodies. This one is simple and elegant, with my terrible voice-leading. You can sort-of play them together. AI-generated source music: 

 Unity Temple and Contrails  

The sound of words is always an issue in songs because they can be awkward for singers. For some listeners, some words are fingernails on a blackboard. For AI "singers," they might never be able to pronounce them, or they hallucinate them, which can sometimes be interesting, or they will put emphasis on the wrong syllables, like "geometry", which AI would pronounce as "GE-om-e-try" with a southern lilt, or ge-om-e-TRY, instead of ge-OM-e-try.  "Quaternity" was also a word it could not pronounce, perhaps because there are no word patterns (embeddings) that start with "quat". It's usually "quo" or "quar" or "quin".  In some cases, the sound of the word itself doesn't matter, particularly in protest songs--like Springsteen's Streets of Minneapolis . The city could be any city, like "Park Forest," and it doesn't matter how musical it is. "Chicago" is famous for its word, an ...

 Seed:   

 Based on a field recording (Smartphone audio) on 11/4/2023  ***

One set of old 90s lyrics and a re-imagining of them by 8 imaginary artists, next in the series of In Sum albums. The Sum II series is music based on specific days--in this case May 1, 1997, the date I finished the lyric. Loud Shirts ( Brain Terrain ) (Power Pop) Cover art is AI-generated based on an idea I once had for a staged photograph. The lighting is wrong but fairly close to how I would have done it. The animation is trigonometry, not geometry. The distorted bass sound is interesting. All these songs also have a "producer". Haley (Bossa Nova) A "Girl From Ipanema" vibe. I love the naive irony of the vocal, as if the vocalist really didn't understand its sarcasm. I included a clip of Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz done for Ipanema. I've always loved this footage because she looks almost catatonic, but bossa nova tunes are typically like this--so smooth you're trapped by its stylistic constraints. (My bugaboo about AI vocals is they they "pack...

*** AI-generated tracks with the same strophic lyric schema. What I want is to have AI work from a MIDI file and match syllables with rhymes. 

 

 Pictures of the TV: Carpet Cowboys  

 A rhythmic riff derived from 1/24/1998, as an intro and outro, coming and going.  0124 (Coming and Going) by meta4s

Perhaps it's "cheating" at composition to steal ideas, but when I hear something I like, I like to transcribe and arrange it--in this case a string quartet made from a short (kind of a Shortet ) ***

  Seed:  

  At a shallow pond On a shallow shore On a shallow lake Never seen before The water clear The sound of the sea The ocean tide Tsunami near Shine the light On a larger stone It's a place You've never known We want to go Where we've gone before But where we land Is what we settle for Bitter taste  The inner show The Interstate A metaphor I love the spooky "Wichita Lineman" vibe in context with Robert Adams' 1968 "Eden" photo and ironic juxtaposition of ponds, lakes, and shores appearing in a dream, and a dry barren landscape. His quote: “After people live awhile in a place to which they’ve laid waste, it gets to be easy to hate a great many things. Including themselves. And anything green that tries to rise again.”  This is one of the instances where the harmony is less cliche and uses 2 Mixolydian modes (C and F), with the key center in F--an odd guitar key--or the stems used were an acoustic guitar with a capo on the first fret.  Would I write a son...

 Twilight Contrails  

  Nosferatu Seed:  

Antipode: July 13ths  1/13/1998 The cloning idea is out of the bottle and it won’t be long before all the wrong people abuse the technology. [In 2002 the Raelians claimed they had cloned a human. A central tenet of Raelianism is the pursuit of biological immortality through human cloning. A company associated with the movement, Clonaid, gained worldwide notoriety by claiming to have produced a clone.] [More]     Reading Edward Hall’s The Dance of Life. He made an interesting observation of Hopi culture with respect to time and rituals. Ritual was much more important than any finished product–sort of like playing music but never writing or recording it. Apparently, the Hopi had a hard time finishing projects because they weren’t driven to bring closure to all their activities, as do Westerners.             [1/13/2025: Most primitive cultures don’t see art as a product. They can be objects of course, but they’re not decorations]. Excerpt ...

 

1/11/1999             Idea: an album of very short songs, 30 seconds or less, “stamp” songs. 1/11/2000 The great thing about films is that they don’t need text in order to convey information, tell stories, or evoke emotion. Text can be added as an embedded layer between image and sound. [1/11/2026: This is what I’m doing with the Curios , which are “microfilms”]   1/11/2003              Bill Russo died at 74. Great obituary in paper. Bill got my musical thinking where it is now. 1/11/2005              The term “music composition” and “composer” are constantly changing, but the process is always essentially the same: making art that unfolds over time. 1/11/2007 Idea: Band that forms and collaborates online, writes all the material, then finally meets in person and rehearses for one show. Band name: Blind Date–or for my band on Second Life. [1/11/2026: What would be interesting to...

A noir-ish vibe on this Curio, but might not be in the final mix and video. Footage I used: "Un Chien Andalou" (Bunuel), A Maya Deren clip, clip from "Kansas City Confidential", clip montage from Lost Highway. Is also the "pilot" for how the scored music is contrasted with more electronic treatments. ***

  Picasso, Guitar (1924).  On wants versus needs in terms of musical instruments:  It's been several years since I've bought a new instrument. I don't focus on that anymore, yet I see a lot of bassists collecting them–some with hundreds. It must consume your entire day–shopping around for them online, having them delivered, reviewing them on YouTube, and so on. Instruments can make a difference in production, but they don’t make a difference in composition most of the time. Instruments are different and unique and can create unique ideas, but once you take the idea and separate it from the instrument, it obviates the instrument. So you buy an 8-string or 12-string: They have a unique sound but once you start to track up a song and compose the song itself, and reduce it to chords and melody–something that you could play on a guitar or a piano, that bass doesn't mean anything. You could use a stock Fender Precision if you're just playing a simple supporting bass part,...

  Something kind of "Jan6", but the seed is in September 2024. If there were a final chord, it would be a free note played triple-F.      

    I was just reading an article on Roland’s 50th Anniversary piano that they created and its 4 speakers are mounted on drones. I’m really interested in that as I’ve always been interested in immersive sound. You could take that back to Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia , a chromatograph that was just a light bulb that shined through a rotating disc that had paintings on it. He custom-made them for people. Music also always wants to extend itself through the instruments in similarly eccentric ways. It’s important that we do that, but it’s never going to catch on, as quad sound never did. There’s too much hardware involved, and it’s just a novelty. People play with it a couple of times and then it just becomes a toy. What we want to do is just keep music where it is and use sound as the main material. But I do like the idea of putting speakers on drones, and it would be interesting to place them in very large spaces that have very high ceilings, where the sounds are more in the distance ...

 

  In composition, listening becomes work.  Composing music in the flow of everyday life requires a constant listening--including AI-generated music. While requiring almost no work to create, AI-generated music requires constant listening to results, which becomes a form of work because you have to curate the results. If everyone generated music in order to play it, everyone would be listening, but not for enjoyment. When I write lyrics, I enjoy the iterative process, but it requires more work than it ever did historically. In the typical songwriting team in the past, the roles of the composer and lyricist didn't overlap. It is the PC that made us all multitaskers beginning in the early 1990s. We do everything ourselves because we can. Perhaps we should strive for more of a division of labor, but we might prefer to play all the roles and wear all the hats. The benefits of music are that the more we create, the more we have to listen to in a sequential fashion, which keeps our a...