Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

 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 ...