Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

Photographs for (AI) music (Walker Evans)  Blind is based on Dynaxiom 3384: Nostalgia can make us blind to the shadows. Back To Egypt is a re-make of a 1998 song, done in a Blues/Gospel style. It's interesting to hear "someone else" cover your songs.

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

 Rhythm of the day--a "mirror" rhythm:    

 

 Seed rhythm:   Seed melody and chords:     Result in an ultra-classical style but might get re-contextualized later:   First Map of the Sky (September 7) by meta4s

February 7ths 8/7/2000             Prediction: People will eventually get sick of downloading entertainment. You’ll have 10,000 files on your hard drive and not use any of it. You’ll want to go out and see a film or a concert and not have to have a copy of it. [8/7/2025: Streaming resolved the issue of downloading copies, but the issue is now an overwhelming number of options, especially with film and video. Perhaps if we had a small physical library of films, we’d choose to watch those first because we valued them enough to have a copy. But that’s not what happens. Consider a library with stacks of books. How many people browse through stacks anymore? I think it’s useful to just browse through the spines of books to find something interesting, which could have been published 25 years ago. Looking at spines is the book equivalent of scrolling, but the choice is easier because you are limited by the number of books you can carry. The equivalent of going...

January 7ths   7/7/1969 (Beatles Studio Diary) Studio 2, Here Comes the Sun. Another triumph for George Harrison. Inspiration from Eric Clapton while in sunny garden of Clapton’s home. His sense of liberation immediately inspires the song and perfectly captures that feeling.  7/7/1996 Mr. PC (AI Version)   7/7/1997 Song titles: “Then and There”, “Right Here and Now”             A songday riff, with sunlight on the page:                       7/7/2005 Terrorist attacks in London subway. Al Qaeda claims responsibility. Ironic that just yesterday London was jubilant about winning the 2012 Olympics. Ironic that attacks were in the subway, where people sought refuge in the WWII German blitz. Will be interesting to see all the photos and video taken with camera phones.  [7/7/2025: Decidedly a different kind of morning than sitting in a sunlight-dappled garden]   7/7/2024 Be...

 

Antipode: December 7ths 6/7/1886 (Chicago) (Thomas Sullivan) Attended trial proceedings. Spies, Parsons, and others—accused men who look ordinary enough in daylight. Prosecutor: “foreign anarchism”, defense–workers’ rights. Truth lies somewhere between rhetoric.  Murphy caught reading a labor pamphlet during lunch break. Dismissed on the spot. Reading becomes subversive. Barber on State Street: shares neighborhood gossip—which families receive “radical” newspapers, who attends suspicious meetings.  The city is a “nervous system” of informants and suspicions. Everyone watching everyone else.  6/7/1989 (Keith Haring Journal) “Had lunch with Yoko and Sam Havadtoy and then went shopping for a vase for her performance tonight....We went to see an incredible installation by Nam Jun Paik at the MoMA of Paris. It's amazing what images he gets out of a TV screen and the speed with which they change. This is what television as an art form is all about....”  [From the advent of...

  5/7/1998 Book: Margaret Boden’s The Creative Mind. She said that tonality in music contains the seeds of its own destruction (referring to serial music). It’s interesting to compare books about creativity. Those who focus on the psychological aspects infer that the act of creation is predicated on the playing out of unconscious elements, and those who focus on the workings of the brain featuring the conscious elements. I prefer the latter, but five years ago I would have leaned more towards the former.  Constraints on thinking...make certain mental structures possible.” Discover a process or way of working and have it generate the product, then start breaking the rules. This is like making a meal from a recipe, but changing measurements, spicing, and so on to fit your taste.  [5/7/2026: If you didn't break your own rules, creativity would become too stiff. Technically, it's called "rule drift"] ["Discuss rules"] 5/7/1999, Friday   Re: E.O. Wilson’s Consil...

AI Chartjunk on 4/7   4/7/2013 As a musician, I am always ready to move on in terms of the instruments that we use to make our art, and I am an ardent fan of lots of new music that has parted ways with the traditional piano. I am forever conjoined with physical instruments but have no emotional or nostalgic feeling for them (at least as of yet). I can move on to electronic music and come back to them anew and feel their unique power. [4/7/2025: This is what I've been doing with AI music in combination with manual playing and writing. I find both are interesting in their own ways And they can cross pollinate with one another. For example, I'll generate a song based on my lyrics, and then transcribe the song into a lead sheet]. 4/7/2017                       To the extent that one includes all sound as being potentially musical, then background music is ubiquitous. The only place devoi...

  Only 55 (Strings) by meta4s

2/7/1998 Book: Slaves of the Machine by Greg Rawlins. Enjoyable about the evolution of computers. I believe that this evolution will eventually bring us to a place where computers will actually evolve on their own if we let them. I like the idea that computers “learn” as humans do. It makes sense that software should be intuitive and smaller in scale, rather than having a huge program that does everything. It’s better to have lots of smaller programs that compute by consensus.     [2/7/2025: This essentially describes the evolution of computing and networking over the past quarter century to where we are with AI. It’s always been the wish.  Wishes that involve technology usually will go off the rails because they evolve too quickly with no friction and obviously compromises democracy]. The Slaves riff/seed:   2/7/2010             The studio is largely a state of mind, especially from the standpoint of art emanating from i...

1/7/2001              Interesting experiment conducted in school children in India: They found that within 10 minutes they knew what they were doing, even though they never saw a computer before; They taught themselves in groups without assistance; Icons are not necessary cross-cultural; Like music and art, you can find your way through it without being taught anything; Content is ubiquitous–the teacher is not the repository of content; Let the student make the learning agenda and the teacher makes the connection with the theoretical; There has to be a reason to do something before learning it.   1/7/2008                                                        1/7/2023 It’s interesting how both artists and musicians who grew up in the 60s and 70s are still doing the same things that they were doing as they’ve a...

  A Songday based on the 4/7/1998 entry that Tammy Wynette died at 55. (It was actually 4/6).

  Lynch Lane  

 

The Ellsworth Kelly in the courtyard at the Art Institute on a rainy day over two people walking in the rain at Clark and Adams.