Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

  Seed is the phrase " hunting ghosts in broad daylight", from this AI-generated diary entry by Thomas Sullivan, a fictitious character living in Chicago in 1886. So it goes from AI to human back to AI in the AI versions.   8/5/1886 I find myself hunting ghosts in broad daylight. Yesterday, wandering near where Miller’s store once stood, I searched for some trace of the black bunting from Lincoln’s mourning. Nothing. Glass and granite have consumed every landmark of my younger self. Time moves differently now—not the urgent acceleration I felt in ‘75, but a strange compression. Decades telescope into moments. I remember the weight of thirty years like yesterday’s coat, yet cannot recall what I ate for breakfast. AI Versions:

 Seed:    Score:   AI-generated Audio:

   

  6/5/2025  A song about cults.  The bridge is self-referential, talking about selling it. I took a long time to get the LLM to understand that, even when it was clearly marked in the lyric as [Bridge].  It also took several weeks to refine the lyric, so the Tan Van version is the final lyric and and Steel Shadows was the first draft. "It manifests when you know in your bones that something isn't right, or something doesn't seem true to you, but you go along with it due to external pressure from authorities or groups. Examples include being sold "snake oil" remedies despite an inner feeling of disbelief, or continuing to smoke because it was fashionable despite feeling it was wrong." (Emmy van Duerzen)  *** Follow the leader He'll sell you a bridge See you all down at Choctaw Ridge Sell you down the river Sell you a bridge See you all down at Choctaw Ridge Blessings that we're after Lessons from before Swimming back and forth From shore to shore  Hea...

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...

 An extension of the original seed orchestration of a recording of civil defense sirens.    *** Seed Scores: *** ***

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

  Fishing Near Winchelsea, Sussex , John Horace Hooper   10/5/1899 (Rye, East Sussex, England)             (William James Diary) Letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman:             ...The land is bathed in greenish-yellow light and misty drizzle of rain. The little town, with its miniature brick walls and houses and nooks and coves and gardens, makes a curiously vivid and quaint picture, alternately suggesting English, Dutch, and Japanese effects that one has seen in pictures, all exceedingly tiny.... Prose converted to a poem or lyric: [Discuss the similarities and differences between, prose, poetry, and lyrics] The land is bathed In greenish-yellow light And misty drizzle of rain The little town With its houses and coves Curiously vivid and quaint English, Dutch, and Japanese effects All exceedingly tiny     10/5/2000             Revolution in Serbia. Milosevic overthrown...

9/5/1997 Sir Georg Solti died at 84.     Black-out lyric: Rhythm of the words: 9/5/2005 I liked what Wynton Marsalis said on Nightline about the cultural importance of New Orleans on the development of music. We sometimes see it as a strictly American phenomenon, when in fact it is a melange of influences from around the world. It is decidedly American in that it was considered “the sound of democracy”—with everyone swinging, drums and bass grooving together.     [9/5/2025: Chicago is culturally upstream from New Orleans and look what is happening to democracy as the military invasion of the city is imminent, as if it were Kyiv].    9/5/2024 “Language” as a verb: How can we language this problem?              Playing versus using music: We don’t “make” AI art or music. We “use” it. When we go to websites to generate it we are not musicians with an instrument; we are users on a website. We don’t “use” a musical in...

February 5ths 8/5/2000  Film at 3-Penny Cinema: Time Regained . Visually stunning. Loved the scene at the recital where the audience seems to be gliding on a platform of some kind, which moved while the camera panned, causing the illusion that background objects moved faster than the camera.  8/5/2019               I recall watching an interview with Andre Segovia where he criticized composers for not fully understanding the guitar. Ideally, composers should defer to players’ creative input and revise accordingly.                     My personal opinion is that putting musicians in a position to play it strictly as written in fact does stifle creativity. Maybe they prefer to play it that way. [8/5/2025: If I am scoring something to be a recording only-and not to be performed, I won’t bother putting in any articulations that don’t affect the sound–which goes back to the idea that all ...

  January 5ths  7/5/2022 Will AI be “beneficial” to music? The term “beneficial” can be applied when something is used in the general flow of creative output, such as when Bob Dylan “went electric”. AI will similarly have to “go electric” in some way. It wasn’t that Dylan stopped playing an acoustic, but there was a paradigm shift in culture.     [7/5/2025: If 2025 was like 1965, it's the year AI music went "electric". But you can still play real instruments. There's this idea that technology destroys purity somehow, or that it's "profane". I loved the Blonde On Blonde album. I wonder if 2025 will be seen in retrospect as a sea change year, as 1966 was.] 7/5/2025 One innuendo is all it takes.  What happens to a sound when it reaches 50? Was Big Band still relevant in the 1980s? I think the definition of nostalgia shifts with feelings of "missing out". Since many musicians were influenced by Big Band in the 80s and were still using those kinds o...

5/5/2010 Interesting: John Cage got the idea for 4'33' from a student's idea to put blank records in a jukebox to break up the playing of the music.  5/5/2018 “Rings”. “The Battle of Sole Bay/Three Pink Clouds”—an improvisation for The Battle of Sole Bay.   5/5/2024 Frank Stella has passed at 87. I’m still inspired by his DIY spirit—that you didn’t need training to just do it—very rock ‘n’ roll in a way, where you could make art or music just through emulation. “I really wanted more than anything to make art that was as good as the good artists were making. I wanted to make art someday — and I didn’t expect it to be that way right away...” I find myself thinking along the same lines, or using the same techniques.  5/5/2046, Saturday   The Immortality Party ["What's the Immortality Party?"]    

 

4/5/2024 Dream: I was at a restaurant dining with a stranger who apparently was a historian, but who suddenly disappeared. Expansion of this idea to orchestra, perhaps to be developed further.

2/5/2005 The Eno album I’ve always liked is On Land , but I also like his pop material, e.g. Before and After Science . Like Cage, he melded the philosophical and conceptual with music. What I used later on was the idea of “avoiding” music, but ultimately I became a “born again” musician. I suppose I just like playing. But the way I write and record was heavily influenced by Eno. This is what Eno would have said about Cage.  Interesting: Black MIDI is a way to use something for it wasn’t originally intended for special effects. The main purpose is to introduce extreme ideas as brute force to heave oneself out of ruts. (Go to an extreme and retreat to a more useful position). It’s also another form of slippage—using the punched hole as the printer dot.          2/5/2011 Prediction: By 2016, the Internet of Things will have grown exponentially and will pervade social media. Text messaging will become automatic and will obviate the need to type into a mobile ...

1/5/1944 (Naples 44) "The new sindacos, the mayors who have been appointed by AMG, the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory, to replace the old Fascist podestás, are stated in the main to be members of the criminal Camorra. It is common knowledge that these have been appointed through the influence of Vito Genovese, the American gangster who, having obtained employment as an interpreter, has now maneuvered himself into a position of unassailable power in the military government. Law and order depend on badly equipped and badly armed Carabinieri and Pubblica Sicurezza, who have two or three men apiece in each town-all of them under constant threat of attack by well-armed criminals. When I called yesterday on the Carabinieri at Acerra, I was shown round the town by a brigadiere who walked at my side with pistol drawn and cocked. Last week bandits raided the police station here, killing the NCO on duty, wounding another policeman and taking the few poor obsolete weapons t...

11/5/1997             The artist of the future should develop the ability to see things from all angles and all disciplines. We should write music from an architectural standpoint, or design structures based on music or sound. Art should be a synesthetic experience rather than one-dimensional, “unisensorial” or from a purely literal perspective. Not only does a musician need to play in-tune and in-time, but be of the times.             [11/5/2024: Quincy Jones certainly was of the times in the time of his prime. He was already into rap in the mid-70s, using it in context with African drumming and chanting]. LLM : “Discuss interdisciplinary approaches to creativity”  11/5/1999 New Gehry bandshell design unveiled for Millennium Park. Clearly an example of “go to an extreme and retreat to a more useful position.”  11/5/2000               Artist Marcos Raya: “My head is fu...