Lee Barry Composition Diary

  Originally, the plan was to make it an album of 12-15 pieces, but now it's open-ended. With increasingly hi-res audio and video, the video release with a vinyl version is the way to go. 

A piece generated from a few of my Dynaxioms on photography. 2006. Photos are confection for memory; You can't avoid being seduced by them. You want to forget, but the beautiful photo haunts you forever. If you lost a great city, you should destroy all the old photos as well. [Anything can be reconstructed from memory, and gives room for innovation that wouldn't have been there in the first version]. (9/12/2001) 0023. Sometimes history books (and films) say more about history than history itself. Recording history is like remembering a dream--with fragments stitched together into a narrative that develops a life of their own.   Before it was celluloid A record and a trace A picture on a postcard The fading of a place We see with the eyes of the heart Can you see me as I am? Vision sacralized The divining of a plan Photos are confection for memory You can't avoid being seduced You want to forget But the beautiful photos Haunt you forever Figments of imagination Emulsion of e...

 AI-Generated Photo    

 Reading Cones--Richard Serra  

 

The last version for No. 4 which superimposes orchestral scoring against synth parts. The scoring is actually a transcription of the synth loops, such as the ascending whole tone scale. You can play them together somewhat. *** 

  Alternately about continuous software "improvements" to justify its success (bells and whistles), or just saying things are going well when they aren't. The Special Hello version is my pick with its nice vocal melismas.   ***  Another whistle   Another bell   Another shoe   Another fell      Keeping secrets   Never tell   Always say   You're doing well      Another bell   Another ring   Another wish   Another dream      Keeping secrets   Never tell   Always say   You're doing well   

      The order in which we do things has also changed in that text can now generate both audio and video using AI. So it’s easier to start with text, so you don’t have to deal with sound and visuals later; the text automatically does that. But it’s the ideas (not from text) that are now missing from generated art, but you can add those later as well, just as you would add a narrative to a film that was all eye candy. It’s like making the architectural plans for a house you already built. The lyric is tangentially based on the Out of Order blog post, as well as the Oblique Strategy:   Do the last thing first Reverse *** Do the last thing First Reverse Do the last thing Do the first thing Last Reverse Do the first thing Do the last thing First Reverse Do the last thing Do the first thing Last Reverse Do the first thing Do the last thing (First) Reverse Do the last thing Do the first thing Last (Reverse) Do the first thing 

  Diminished and Whole-Tone clashes--the shortest Curio so far. All are a minute or shorter.

   Lyrics derived from a series of lines I jotted down while watching the Artemis fly-by.  AI music is a nostalgia jukebox, but you write the lyrics for all the songs. My pick is "Call of Nature" The moonlight   Falls heavy on my soul   The soil turned to white   Black into the cold   Impact flash   Injection burn   First live look   Then another turn      Are you ready for when it shines?   You're getting close to the terminator line    At the start, the mission new   Not just you and the terminator view    On my pillow, a trillionth of a feather   Better look out for the space weather   Sitting in the earthshine--adjust the heat   Waiting for the fly-by   Grooving to the beat      Looking at the moon   At the terminator line   You saw the far side   Not ...

Art Used:  Left: Japanese Warrior Woodblock Print by Kuniyoshi (mid-1800s) Center: Hercules At His Funeral Pyre over clip from Peter Greenaway's Belly of an Architect,   Anthropomotries -- Yves Klein Right: Antiquity (Ariadne Titian Bacchus Popcorn)- -Jeff Koons Frame: The Donne Triptych by Hans Memling

   Theory is a way to fully understand something, but not to the extent that you could successfully apply it. Applying knowledge requires giving shape so that you can examine it. You could have ideas for a sculpture, and you could know lots of theory on some other subject that could be applied conceptually, but attention has to be paid to that particular form, because that's what others see. In music, you can know theory, and you can apply it to form, but it's a question of theory serving the idea.  I recall an anecdote about The Beatles discovering the B7 chord, and it opened up new possibilities. You could later learn that it's the dominant chord in E minor, and you could continue to study functional harmony because it's interesting, but it still has to be applied, or simply used in the flow of your work. Harmony is, in fact, functional and is ready to be applied, but how does it serve the art? Jazz is harmonic (or vertical) by its nature, and theory guides its compos...

Given the seed for this, originally titled "Russians", it ironically has nothing to do with the original vibe. Somehow a clip from Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (the diner scene) seemed to fit with it, rather than paintings, WWI footage or photographs. It's a pure postmodern treatment.

Art: [Hash Art]   AI Music: 

 Corner of Randolph, Marion, and Wisconsin  

 Kinzie Street Bridge  

  Sometimes I like to interact with AI-generated music to see what's under the hood. AI music is the new radio that musicians play along with, but they are also generating the songs. I think it's a great way to learn music and start writing. This is a pop song I generated from my lyrics in an early-mid 70s pop style--a style I grew up with on AM radio, so this is somewhat of a nostalgia trip. It's like the late '70s when I would turn on the radio and play along. So I attempted to put my own bass part on it as I would on any track. The existing part was almost imperceptible. My approach to bass parts is always compositional in nature. You can't ride the root all the time, and you have to think about the overall shape of the lines, what range they are played in, and how it is a counterpoint with the other parts. For pop music like this, you don't want too much below the staff, keeping in the low range of a guitar, then changing octaves for contrast. The playing o...

 

5/7/2024 civil defense sirens: Pitches are E#, B D, F#  

  The original song, You Go To My Head, was written in 1938 and was covered many times over the decades. It's one of the most standard of Standards. A few years ago,  I watched a film based on the same title, about a woman who was involved in a rollover accident in the Moroccan desert, was concussed and got long-term amnesia. She was picked up by an architect who was working in Morocco building houses for people. He had also built a house for himself–a very minimal house–very Corbusian–just a white stucco structure, which I really liked. I had never seen a film that was shot in Morocco–totally gorgeous. The screenplay was almost stupid and characters wooden, but the cinematography was interesting, shot in Morocco with Guilhem Eustache's Fobe House as a set. All natural lighting. I saw lots of David Lynch influence.  What was particularly interesting as a corollary was that a person who had been concussed and has memory loss is sort of like an artificial intelligence or a...

This is a passage from the book The Story of Stories where I’m swapping our “story” for “song” as a corollary between stories and song lyrics. I don’t think lyrics have to tell stories, but rather suggest them. Even if the songwriter explains what it’s about, listeners will find different stories which might be triggered by words, lines, or couplets. I like them to be about something if possible, but music has a top-down control on what you can get away with in a lyric, and also how the singer sings it. A bunch of random lines that means nothing in themselves can work well with the right singer. With AI you can experiment with this. It’s much harder with human singers because of the differences in vocal apparatus.  *** And that raises a question: Is a song what is written or what is listened to? This is not a new concern. Literary theorist [Roland Barthes[, among many others; wondered about it. [Barthes] concluded a song is not what is written but what is listened to; so much so t...

  To me, using AI in music is essentially a very conceptual thing, and is an extension of conceptual art—not mainstream. Music itself is a conceptual art even if you’re not doing conceptual work.   I just read an article about the Endel and Plastikman collaboration. Basically what they’re doing are remixes but they’re running them through neural networks and using Alexa Skills, which is interesting. But I don’t see it as that innovative. It’s people trying to be innovative and they’re covering the same ground of people who are now their grandparents or great-grandparents. If you consider the threads of classical music, we’re sort of still doing that as well. It’s a way to be conceptual-cool as a musician. I did it too at age 35.   The problem I have with AI music is that it doesn’t really give you anything to do over longer periods. Once the Beatles were using the studio as an instrument their time in the studio increased. If all they ever did in the studio was let machin...