Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

  Hilma af Klint "Svanen, nr 17 (1915) Artists and musicians are probably more protean than other people because they can find themselves in situations where they might get interested in certain things. One that comes to mind is theosophy. There were a lot of artists and musicians who were into that, and they probably wouldn’t have gotten into it just on their own by reading a book. There were probably clubs and meetings where composers and artists congregated, shared ideas, and found opportunities.  This also works with political art as well: I was surprised that Stravinsky had a number of meetings with Mussolini, and they had a mutual regard for one another. This was the time when he went into his neoclassical period, when he was getting away from the dissonant music and into things that were more conservative and traditional.  Composers and artists and even pop musicians can suddenly do a 180 and start doing things that most people wouldn’t, but I think largely it’s be...

Films and novels can be "dry runs" for reality. An idiom now baked in the cake is "It was something you'd see in a movie". Films are also like dreams, where the narrative is fragmented as if edited like a film. Stills/footage used: Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, as well as film burns. "Discuss disaster movies"    The 4th track is a teenage band that made their first demo on an 8-track reel-to-reel.  ***

Cloud Dictionary (7/4 Etude) by meta4s

An example of using an alternate tuning (E-G#-D-F#) on bass for song ideas. While you poke around in the new tuning, you stumble on ideas you wouldn't have gotten in standard tuning. The short name for the tuning is "Drop 31", meaning the third and first strings are dropped.  

If the world decides to go crazy it isn't likely that you can avoid the wild party for long. There's always going to be noise coming from that party keeping you awake at 3AM. You'll grow tired of always having to use earplugs or white noise to mask it.  The thing of it is, we must live with the living.— Montaigne From the book Third Ear, Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening: “I found myself unable to ignore a steady pounding rhythm from somewhere in my neighborhood. It wasn't exactly a mechanical banging or jackhammering or chopping, but some relentless concussion. At times it seemed as though my body was being hit over and over. Later, the noise gave way to the whining of a leaf blower. I wanted so much to tune it all out, delete it, and yet I had to surrender to it being there, around me and in some sense upon me, invasive and unavoidable. Two nights later, I was awakened by the roar of my furnace that had kicked on by some automatic setting I don't re...

Was looking at photos of Loomis Dean, a LIFE photographer in the 50s and this photo caught my eye as to go with this experimental track, done with a Juno 106, MT-32 module and MC-300 Sequencer, using a pre-existing MIDI file mapped randomly. 

Possible music for the black-out lyric    

The relevance of Robert Ager's analysis of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his conclusion that the mono­lith is a metaphor for the cinema screen, seems inescapable in light of research into cognition in media and memory. 

This perhaps sounds a bit too Beethoven but the extended versions will mask it. The seed is from a diary entry in January that had a staccato feel.              My process at the moment is to sample phrases from texts and reduce them to riffs as an "A" idea then extrapolate them--both as an instrumental and with different lyrics. There could be an AI version titled "Docking Station", but the phrase could also be swapped out with other lyrics and have nothing to do with that theme. This could easily be for full orchestra, but the other parts would essentially be doublings. What this is is starting with an orchestral arrangement then building a song around it. I have others that have been extended out and they have turned into prog instrumentals, and could have vocals over the top of them.  

[From 2021-2024 I was keeping a video diary as a form of dictation, and these are some of the transcripts from 2/18, which I've edited into actual written entries}. 2/18/2021 When I first started writing songs in the early 90s I did write some political lyrics. Most songwriters typically do when they’re in their 20s and 30s because they become interested in the world and where it’s going. My first political songs were around the first Gulf War and the war in the Balkans, specifically one inspired by an article I had read about two young lovers who were trying to flee Sarajevo and were shot down. It was a galvanizing story in the news at the time and a documentary was subsequently made about it. Inspired by Sting’s Nothing Like the Sun and Soul Cages albums, it was more philosophical than it was political. The former actually interests me more.  I’m not the kind of artist who can make effective political statements. I’m more comfortable writing the music and lyrics and having som...

  Seed rhythm 2/17/2025   Curio No. 73 by meta4s

   While technologies can extend perception, they can also mask it. Hearing music through speakers or headphones is one level of transmission loss. Experiencing the visual world through a camera is kind of a transmission loss, compared to direct observation, but creates a space for creativity.             On a cold morning recently, the air was very still, and I got a chance to experience sound refraction, where the sound source is displaced or bent, similar to light refraction through glass or water. Sound appears to be closer than it really is, even though sound is traveling slower through cold air. But there is no way to artificially recreate sound refraction through headphones, as the sound spatiality is flattened. Then I realized that direct experience is not always better in an aesthetic sense because with art, you want some degree of artifice because that’s where the creativity is. There is no creativity through simply experiencing a m...

 

  Marimba, Gamelan and Taiko are muted but will be in the final recordings.

 

 

  Redimade Shadow

   Excerpt Library (Music I) The provided sources encompass a wide-ranging collection of texts addressing music theory, film studies, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and cultural history . Music Theory and Compositional Practice These sources provide both historical and technical perspectives on the creation of music. Terence Dwyer offers a practical guide to musique concrète , focusing on using tape recorders as instruments to manipulate sounds through speed changes, reversals, and editing. Paul Hindemith details a rigorous system for two-voice composition , emphasizing the importance of tonal higher-units and degree-progressions. Igor Stravinsky reflects on the dogmatic element of order in music, arguing that composition is a work of selection and that music is "powerless to express anything at all" beyond its own form. Edgard Varèse advocates for the "liberation of sound," defining music as the "corporealization of the intelligence that ...

  Piranesi/Panopticon Curio No. 41 (2) by meta4s

   The first edition ends at 3047 and this is the supplement. 3052. The door to jazz is through rhythm. If you don't like jazz, your body probably doesn't understand swing--or it actually does, and your mind gets in the way. 3055. Art allows you to see technology in a different way than the mainstream. 3057. You can't really play until you know how to play. 3059. Artists know what they want faster than what AI can tell them what they should want. 3060. Stop using a tool if it isn't producing interesting results for you. People are using AI as a tool and we don't consider whether it's interesting. It just mass-produces something. Imagine scissors were just invented. We'd try them on everything. This happened with cameras when they became affordable. 3074. Sometimes art is spiritual; Sometimes it doesn't have time for it. 3078. If I decide rock music is now a 'classical' music, I don't have to feel too old to play it. 3079. If music is too muc...

2/6/1997 A Pollyanna projection: "By the year 2021, we'll colonize Mars and we'll be able to download all our entertainment from government servers..." Earth-Mars communications will be problematic as it takes four minutes for transmission. How long would it take to download our "entertainment"? Which begs the question: Do we want to spend our lives downloading Earth on Mars? "StarTrek-y" shows need to use more anachronisms, e.g. 78 records, Victorian-era clothing to offset the assumption that "in the future, the world will look like THIS." It would be more convincing if they used bits and pieces from different eras, which is what the real world is anyway 2/6/2010 Idea for performance: reverse the stage setup so the drummer is center-stage and the vocalist in the back or even off-stage sometimes, but put a camera there as well. [2/6/2026: Great treatment for Rush's Limelight on the 2026 tour with the new drummer replacing Peart, but ...

A song seed based on Dynaxiom 3241: Just because you said it yourself doesn't mean you'll always believe it yourself. [You might have said something 10 or 20 years ago and might have moved on. The whole purpose of the Dynaxioms is that they are dynamic, and can be continually edited, or reimagined in music]. How will it evolve?     

  AI music can't hold a candle to music historically. As interesting as it is for some purposes, such as trying out lyric ideas in different genres, it simply doesn't have the vocabulary that skilled artists have. Sometimes the candle holder will have a brilliant idea, and they can easily produce it mixed and mastered, but when you analyze it, there isn't much substance. My two main rants about AI music are its narrow harmonic vocabulary and the way lyrics are mapped rhythmically. This mapping consists (as I understand it) of "packing" lyric lines to fit symmetrical schemas that exist in the rhythmic stems, or phrasing in clunky machine-like ways. People do it too--the popular one being the way Lennon sings "people" in Imagine . "People" is naturally spoken on a downbeat. The more natural way is to syncopate it. AI vocals are always doing this, and you can't easily change it. Discussing the history of songwriting in this way is depressing v...

Imagine it's 1979 and you have been playing bass for just 2 years and you're using AI as your teacher.  Source: Excerpt Library (Music Theory Articles 1979-1999)  

  Art by Hugh Ferriss Version 2: Version 1:

2/2/1998  Book: The Dance of Life by Edward Hall–another absolutely fascinating book by Hall, this time about various cultural viewpoints on the subject of time, how to be congruent, vis-a-vis artistic expression, with it being the yardstick as to whether something is authentic. On synchrony in music: “People can be observed syncing when music is being played. There is a popular misconception about music because since there is a beat to music, it is generally accepted that the rhythm originates in the music, not that music is a releaser of rhythms already in the individual. Otherwise, how does one explain the close fit between ethnicity and music“. He should take it a bit further to say that the rhythms of American culture (trends and fashion), are sometimes the beat we groove to, whether we know it or not. Entrainment provides an explanation for the syncing of lovers, even across time and space. This is similar to Sheldrake’s morphic resonance. Hall also discovered that there are...

From a noodling around on the bass in Eb Lydian, then transcribed. Begins in D Phyrigian and ends in Eb Lydian.  Curio No. 67 by meta4s