Lee Barry Composition Diary

  Curio 76 ("Sirens") is one of the pieces that has been extended to 7 minutes, and this is an extracted short . The painting is The Sirens and Ulysses by William Etty The audio is actually generated from the Morse Code  .-- .- .-. -. .. -. --. ... / .-.. --- ... . / - .... . .. .-. / .--. --- .-- . .-. / .-- .... . -. / - .... . -.-- / .- .-. . / .-. . .--. . .- - . -.. / - --- --- / --- ..-. - . -.   Decode    Score:   

  Back in the 70s, songwriters wrote about cities: Phoenix, Wichita, Galveston. This lyric wasn't a riff on that--only the rhythm of the phrase "Hotel in Carlsbad". But Baltimore and Galveston are more interesting for a potential narrative--and are 3-syllable words. I like that it remains ambiguous and suggests that it's about the devastating hurricane in 1900 and the aftermath, but it really isn't--but could be by associating images with it.   ***  When the rains returned Cloud after cloud I went back to the place  Where the waves made a sound The virga would fall But I wouldn't hear a thing I was welcomed to a world Where the rains would begin Hotel in Galveston Far from African dust A new atmosphere Of American lust Saw it in a noondream Of America's bloom It's embedded in a place From the bust to the boom A place tells a story Not erased by time It's in your hand In the feel of a rhyme Copyright 2026 Lee Barry. Lyric rights reserved  

  Writing lyrics in the AI era is a new form of writing. Obviously, lyrics are a form of poetry, but ultimately, music shapes the meaning--if it has any at all. With AI-generation, the process of idea to a final mix is very fast--too fast in fact--which drives forms of writing that could become lyrics. It's another form of "the medium is the message": the medium makes messages possible things that weren't possible before.  It also makes it more difficult to find relevance: It may mean something to you because you wrote them, but is it a song as relevant as The Streets of Minneapolis in 2026--or any protest song? An AI-generated protest song is actually a strange idea and highlights the difference between AI and humans, primarily an awareness of a galvanizing moment. It can generate a protest song and use Springsteen's voice as a model and might actually have the same emotional valence, but there aren't 10,000 people gathered in a park listening to someone perf...

  If you’re a musician or artist for long enough various things will overlap with your music. What happened to me was that I studied jazz and classical then started exploring other areas: spirituality, psychology, and philosophy. Many of the electives I had taken in college were taking place at the same time as the music classes. For example, I’d have a harmony class in the morning and a philosophy class in the afternoon. So there was a slippage between the two and began to affect my lyric writing around 1990.  There was a piece that I wrote called Path of Salvation , partly inspired by the book Communion by Whitley Streiber which came out around 1989. I had not been interested in UFOs although I knew people who were interested in them, and I had drawn parallels between ufology and spirituality because I think they’re related in some ways. That was the first new influence that changed my approach to music. There were other things that happened along the way but fell by the way...

  A cut-up of various diary entries, in this case, April 28ths. It also references a passage from W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn , where he mentions sunken willows.  "Through Brundall, Buckenham and Cantley, where, at the end of a straight roadway, a sugar-beet refinery with a belching smokestack sits in a green field like a steamer at a wharf, the line follows the River Yare, till at Reedham it crosses the water and, in a wide curve, enters the vast flatland that stretches southeast down to the sea. Save for the odd solitary cottage there is nothing to be seen but the grass and the rippling reeds, one or two sunken willows, and some ruined conical brick buildings, like relics of an extinct civilization."  "It was on a grey, overcast day in August 1992 that I traveled down to the coast in one of the old diesel trains, grimed with oil and soot up to the windows, which ran from Norwich to Lowestoft at that time. The few passengers that there were sat in the half-light on th...

This isn't about the film Project Hail Mary per se, but makes a reference to the age of stars (metaphor) and "astrophage" (star-killers), with the larger SciFi film trope of dynamos for space travel. My pic: #1, but they're all interesting in unique ways. Interstellar light Shines in the dark You''ll never notice The original spark We won't know What Interacts with the light Until it appears Right out of the night A middle-age star An energy dome How long it will live Is not something we know Light never ages It just fades away It travels farther Farther from today A planet's tides Forces at play Other things [That speed the decay] That drive the replay Astrophage Is dimming the sun With climate change The world is one Energy dome Far away from home The energy dome For the trip going home Copyright 2026 Lee Barry. Lyric rights reserved.

  Think the the jazz/funk scene circa 1970. Seed:    

  3/25/1997   I did a count of all the pieces I’ve written since approximately 1983, when I bought my first keyboard and 4-track, and I now have almost 300 songs and other compositions on about 150 cassettes, much of it jazz and experimental music.   I like guitar players who approach the instrument from lots of different angles, where you don’t have to always play it as if it were only a guitar. (Andy Summers, Robert Fripp come immediately to mind)—the “painting” approach, where you use different “brush” techniques. 3/25/1998 Black-out poetry About a Girl  He couldn’t get The right mood She explained That it was about a girl Waiting for her lover In a motel room She explained  That it was about a girl 3/25/2021   Musicians seem to like things that are really technical. I’m still surprised to see so many people getting into music theory and they want the real complex things with chord changes that are like mathematical formulas. But they’re not mathematic...

  Thomas Cole Over Rubens  4 against 3, with the drum part in 4.  Seed: The words "scatter" and "matter" alternating.  

 More possibilities for development. 

  There was a photo exhibition at the Art Institute about 10 years ago that primarily featured Polaroids. In one of the works, the photos were flipped so that it showed just the backs of the photos with writing on them. As you read them, an image would appear in your imagination. The backs The backs  The backs of the photographs Turn around the phrase Turn around the beat The shifting of your gaze Your eyes are on the street Frame the caption card The only thing you see  You think you're seeing art It isn't what it means The backs The backs The fax/facts of the photographs 

An example of how one work can start to generate other pieces. The process for the Curios is to start the pieces as classical ensembles, then play other parts against them. This is a transcription of bass parts I played against it. It's a "caboose" on the end of it in what is turning out to be jazz--all based on civil defense sirens playing a Bmaj7(#11), The next step is to improvise on bass against this in B Lydian, so it's a kind of Rifts on bass. 

  A song about hunger, perhaps addiction, using a musical metaphor, with "firsts" as The One, or a unison.   Nice intro with the kick on the and of 1. Would a human think of that? The dialect is also interesting with "flats" pronounced as "flaits", and "dance" as "daints" *** Precious little seconds Precious little thirds Precious little fourths As you dance around the words Precious little fifths Precious little sixths Precious major sevenths As you take another first Take it all around  From the first bar to the last First you take the sharps And then you take the flats Precious minor seconds Precious minor thirds Precious perfect fourths As you dance around the words Precious flatted fifths Precious flatted sixths Precious minor sevenths As you dance around the firsts Ticking on a clock Looking at the score You say you're never hungry But you're really wanting more Precious minor seconds Precious minor thirds Precious perfect...

  Jealousy -- Edvard Munch  Seed:    

 War moods. J.M.W. Turner, The Deluge, 1805  

  3/4/2023 Films are like dreams, dreams are like films. I find that to remember a dream I have to “rewind” it like a tape. This is why I’ve always liked David Lynch films because he approximated the dream experience so nicely. Film gave us a new metaphor to live by. Prior to film, dreams were probably more like chapters in books. Films are like dreams Dreams of escape Remembering a dream Rewinding the tape Details are something That a photo does well Even when the eyes Can't even tell When the shadows are wrong In the painting that you made You're looking in the wrong place The beauty's in the shade Neural network eyes A tool for the spy Why we're so obsessed  With the life of the other guy This is why I like A David Lynch film How life is a dream Was important to him  When the shadows are wrong In the painting that you made You're looking in the wrong place The beauty's in the shade   My picks: 5, 6, 4, 1 

3/16/2024 AI is a good way to rapid-prototype music if you have an assembled cryptic lyric. This one is made of lines abstracted from diary entries made on March 16ths. The meaning is hazy when you first start working with it but possible meanings begin to emerge. The theme seems to be Sisyphean: you could travel the world, crossing mountain ranges, arriving back home and perhaps feeling nothing had changed in some ways. It's also Pinkphloydian : "Running over the same old ground, have we found the same old fears..." The music is extremely saccharine but works in an interesting way. "She" chokes up a bit on the word "change"--a nice happy accident. Sometimes I try To map out the day A sequence, a play We are suffused in the space of the past To find the first and uncover the last Clouds travel Crossing a range Only to find nothing has changed  Another version as Photographs For Music using a photo taken 3/16/2024:   *** Download:  

  2/23/1965 (Beatles Studio Diary) Studio Two (control room only): 10.00am-1.00pm. Stereo mixing: 'Yes It Is' (from take 14); 'You've Got To Hide Your Love Away' (from take 9); 'If You've Got Trouble' (from take 1); 'Tell Me What You See' (from take 4); 'I Need You' (from take 5); 'Another Girl' (from take 1); 'Ticket To Ride' (from take 2); 'You Like Me Too Much' (from take 8); 'The Night Before' (remix 1, from take 2); 'You're Going To Lose That Girl' (remix 1, from take 3); 'That Means A Lot' (from take 1); 'You're Going To Lose That Girl' (remix 2, from take 3). As a lyric: Studio two 10 to 1 Yes it is Tell me what you see You've got to hide If you've got trouble I need you Another girl Ticket to ride You like me too much The night before You're going to lose You've got to hide If you've got trouble I need you That means a lot   

  AI music creates an absurd situation for artists and musicians. The longer you've been using it, the more you've gotten used to using it, and it's in the flow of your creative activities. But since we don't have control over the variables in manual art making, we are slaves to whatever options are available. The results are pretty interesting, and I like using AI music generators as I can experiment with lyric ideas. AI doesn’t parse them the way that I personally would. Since I'm a trained musician, I have lots of options. But when you use AI music generators, you have limited options, but the results are interesting, which is different from manual creativity, where you have a lot of options, and the results aren't always so interesting–and it's more work to shape them so that you can feel satisfied with the results.  Since the 1980s, I've juggled writing classical music and pop music, and I'm still continuing to do it today. it can create conflic...

 Intractable  

 Signs   

Vellum Prints : Reality Frames My composition techniques are derived more from general creative strategies, or borrowed from other domains:  Frameworks/Concepts. This is my favorite way of being productive. Typically when I sit down to create, my intention is to work on something in progress, but I keep an ear open for little “happy accidents” and record them right away. I have hundreds of these little snippets. Eventually I go back and put them into the existing frameworks or concepts. Composition Strategies. I have been keeping a running list of Strategies since the early 90s, some of which I made into decks of playing cards. I made some other “virtual” decks that I use for the concepts. I have subsets just for jazz, that only use flat keys for example, and other attributes idiomatic of jazz. Feel free to use them and/or contribute to Cycles and Symmetries. What I call “cycles” are repeating symmetries in the harmony, rhythm or melody to create an armature from which to compose a...

  I am still of the opinion that too many gimmicky tools make creative activities seem empty. When the tool is designed to make one thing, it puts you on a creative hamster wheel. (The software preset is the electronic version of this, where the sound has only one use.) But when the tools are there to solve specific problems, then they become more useful. Better yet is to design the tool to solve the problem, then discard it. Metaphors are another example of a this kind of temporary heuristic. It's the lowest tech thing one can do with most payoff. "We used to varispeed the tape machines for tape echo. The original ADT [Automatic Double Tracking] we did was developed as a result. It was Ken Townshend who came up with a way of taking the signal off the sync head and then delaying it through other varispeeded recorders, so the gap between the two could be adjusted If you got it slightly out, you got phasing. But if you got it out to about 25 to 30 msec, it became a form of ADT....

  Entries 0001-2999 (Paperback) (Volumes I and II combined)  Entries 0001-2999 (Kindle) 3000- 3340 (Kindle Only) LLM for the entire 3000 Series going forward   *** AI Videos:  

3/12/2014 The sonic landscape of a city has its own ecology of “organisms”: the screeching sounds of metal against metal, background hum from power lines, buzzing neon, passing elevated trains, pneumatic machinery—the natural sounds of a city landscape that becomes a quotidian experience, yet unobtrusive and perhaps has a calming effect. (This was mixed to not interfere with the top layer of attention). Used for Photographs For Music : 

  Song about the Music Box Theater in Wrigleyville in Chicago. The small black box theater had lumpy seats and terrible sight-lines. You'd have to watch a film constantly shifting your head.  Seed entry: 2/21/1998 John Lennon said that whatever changes we go through, whether they be permanent or not, last forever because it brought the relationship to a point where both people changed, and that change would not have been possible without the relationship.             Film: Mother and Son by Russian filmmaker. Visually seductive. I would have liked to have seen more image manipulation rather than long static scenes of them in existential discourse. Not much of a score, which gave me lots of ideas of how I do it. Film was in a small theater at the Music Box, replete with lumpy seats and poor sight lines. Funny to watch people before the show switching seats to audio while looking at the back of someone’s head.  Assembled lyric: Went to se...

 3/5/2024   Today’s civil defense sirens are a Bmaj7(#11) chord. Just when I was doing a mix and video, there was a tornado warning issued. Very creepy. Don't loop for too long.  This is the ambient version with electronic treatments and field recording of thunder and rain. You can actually play the score and video together, or play a note in the chord, like F or Bb. ***

The rhythmic seed for this was something I heard on TV while watching the inauguration of the Pope last May. There was an interesting juxtaposition of bell ringing and a brass ensemble (Bb). It's polytonal with the low strings playing a 3-bar repeating phrase of E-naturals and B-naturals with oscillating G minor and E major triads.  For the video, somehow I was thinking of Ben Hur.It's ironic to squeeze a cinemascope aspect ratio into a Short. *** Curio No. 36 by meta4s

  12/4/2025 Song about city artists decamping to Marfa, alluding to Donald Judd (or James Turrell), an "artrepreneur" before it was a term. Art cowboy Cowboy art Places for a cowboy To make his art Leaving for a small town That cowboy-smart Confident and secure Is what you are Open up to people And what they are But you're just a cowboy That cowboy's smart Art cowboy Cowboy art Places for a cowboy To make his art Concrete and glass Art in the Plexiglas Summer nights Watching the Marfa lights The artrepreneur As a local archetype Stopping at the Prada Is just the start Art cowboy Cowboy art Places for a cowboy To make his art  *** The riff for the riff: Documentary on the Perspective channel about Donald Judd, one of the most interesting artists of the 20th century in my view, in the sense that his philosophy involved the power of place, and the ability to negotiate artistic ideals with locals, i.e. the sense that a New York liberal whose art we don't understan...

An interesting diary juxtaposition as a lyric idea.  3/8/2013   Re: Picasso’s “Bull” (plates I - XI) 1945 - 46: Picasso continued his analogy by saying, “a picture used to be a sum of additions”  In my case, a picture is a sum of destruction. I do a picture, then I destroy it.. Perhaps this refers to his idea that there really is no abstract art: “You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality”. He wanted only emotion projected by his art. 3/8/2022  The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already destroyed a Lviv museum containing works by renowned Ukrainian painters, some with substantial cred: Picasso, Chagall. If art never got destroyed by anything, even by time, how much would there be? The population explosion made the art mountains even higher.  Watched Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom . What’s interesting about huge violent protests, or large protests of any kind, is that people show up for all kinds of reasons...

 

  Deangelo's World Rapbrary is a living archive founded by Chicago-based rapper, librarian, and cultural worker Roy Kinsey, rooted in the belief that hip-hop is literature and libraries are cultural sanctuaries.   

 The Lego Model (Source Music II LLM)   

 Bookends  

  The idea behind the Ancient AI album was that there is an artificial intelligence that is built into humanity and is a timeless phenomenon–it’s not something that we just invented; it’s always been there in nature. What I was getting at, at least sonically, was something that sounded broken because I wanted to hold the mirror up to society and show its reflection. I’ve done a 180 since 2016, when things got unnerving in the US and the world so it’s essentially a form of mirror art. I’m of two minds about mirror art: sometimes it’s interesting in a postmodernist sense, so it has a glitchy machine-like quality to it.  (We’ve been making glitch art for some time now. Lots of artists datamosh video as a way of showing that the world is broken, so it was my way of showing that as well. But now, when I relisten to it I think a lot of it is kind of un-listenable–at least with my current ears, because I now consider myself a metamodernist and wouldn’t want to revisit it. Postmodern...

 Some of the preliminary arrangements in one video. 

A lyric has to start somewhere. In this case, it was this entry, then a rhythm sketched in a notebook. AI makes it easy because you're disabused of the (tedium of) recording. Not that recording isn't creative in itself, but AI at least gives you a prototype. Personally, none of these AI spins are something I would do, and I do have my own version of this. AI was also used in the lyric-writing, using an LLM of my entire lyric notebook and the Dynaxioms, so it's essentially a "Dynaxiom song" or an "assembled" lyric with bits coming from several sources. 0132. A 'quiet faith' is a better faith. If people can't hear you they won't try to disagree or try to shoot it down.   0333. Asking 'why' indicates there's a knowledge gap. Saying 'why not' puts [blind] faith before knowledge. That's the essence of 'Just Do It'. (What's the gap between blind faith and intuition?)  3/2/2005   I like the new ad campaign for...

 

  Thomas Cole-- The Course of Empire Installation Diagram AI music is interesting when you want to write in a range of different genres based on a conceptual lyric idea--in this case, historical inflection points, with lyrics that consist mostly of numbers that have 3 syllables, and are pronounced on a downbeat ("eighteen" doesn't work well musically, but "seventeen" does. "Eleven" doesn't because it is pronounced on an upbeat). How old you are at those moments determines how you react to history. If you were 41 on September 11, 2001, your emotional reactions would be different from those of someone who was 21, 61, or 81. You have a different constellation of memories and experiences. If you're 41 now, you have no real memory of the first Gulf War, compared to someone who was 41 then, and so understands the current war with Iran differently.  In 1865, John Wilkes Booth was 29. Lincoln was 56. Someone who was 61 in 1966 would have had no intere...

These robot voices (I call them "Sue" and "Dave") have gotten better but are still geeky. I like how they  "love" everything and are cloyingly perky. Source LLM   

  A section of Bosch's The Last Judgment   Seed is the rhythm for "We are the 99%" (played by timpani) but it's not about OWS.   

  https://insumseries.blogspot.com/search/label/March