Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

Improvisation is a form of spontaneous composition that uses predetermined structural elements, usually chords and scales. Jazz improvisation is understood as being free-form, but is controlled with rules. In Arabic music, there is Taqsim, guided by a different system of rules for improvisation—and similarly with Indian Raga. The eastern versions of improvisation have an additional cultural element that is more important than the West’s focus on improvisation for art’s sake. Interestingly, Taqsim may possibly have some connection with algorithms (simply a series of rules or instructions). The word algorithm is eponymous with Algoritmi, a Persian mathematician. The fact that jazz musicians can relate to physics (and vice versa) is perhaps not just coincidental!             The curious thing about improvisation in anything is that there are always some rules or constraints that are not universal, e.g. a jazz player would be confused by the rules of Taqsi...

8/18/1948 (Jack Kerouac Journal--paraphrased) Jack goes to New York with Tom, jazz club for bop, smoked pot, and pondered epigonism [an imitation of an artist by a subsequent generation], existence of “atomic disease”: “There is something definitely afoot, a madness, one not unlike the late Roman cult-madnesses.”                                   Run through AI:  Extrapolated lyric: Took off for New York Went out with his other girl Enemy of the bourgeois Back to the windblown world Madness of a Roman cult Shadow of the bomb Fell to your knees From atomic disease Jazz club for bop Smoked a lot Pondered beat religion Go back to Kerouac Back to the windblown world Addicted to the city Intellectual juice The splitting of the atom Electrons on the loose Survival paranoia Post-nuclear rage Despair in France The existential age The haunting sound of a breathless saxophone It comes around when you'r...

Ice Core Layers 2010 was the first year that I got my first pair of ear mics and a portable recorder. What I was most interested in was finding places that had embedded Keynotes or Soundmarks (continuous pitched elements in a place) which I wanted to integrate into my ambient music. Field recordings are actually a great way to listen to the environment because the recording apparatus has done some of that listening for you: when you come back and listen to the recording, you hear things that you missed when you were there. It works the same way in photography, where you come back home and look at the images and you see other things that were outside the frame that you didn't notice when you were attempting to get the shot. Even before I was doing field recording myself, I was interested in using field recordings made by others. I had a friend that visited various parts of the globe, one of them Costa Rica. I had taken his field recordings and made an immersive sound environment to ...

From my old Music Ideas list from the 90s. This is #75 "She's A Star". The idea at the time was that the word "star" would have a dissonant interval in it. This would be the intro, a la You Can't Always Get You Want, but would be a fast EDM, not classic rock. In the end, both she (and he) are "diminished". Female Voices She's a star She's our star She's a star He's so glam She's a star She's our star! She's a star Male Voices He's our Tsar He's our man He's so glam He's a Tsar He's a star! He's a star   Score: Art/Footage: The Ugly Duchess by Massys, various Kristin Wiig skits    Upper Part of a Tabernacle For the Holy Sacrament (1465)  

      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 

   Source is a riff from an AI-generated song .   

[From 2021-2024 I was keeping a video diary as a form of dictation, and these are some of the transcripts from 2/18, which I've edited into actual written entries}. 2/18/2021 When I first started writing songs in the early 90s I did write some political lyrics. Most songwriters typically do when they’re in their 20s and 30s because they become interested in the world and where it’s going. My first political songs were around the first Gulf War and the war in the Balkans, specifically one inspired by an article I had read about two young lovers who were trying to flee Sarajevo and were shot down. It was a galvanizing story in the news at the time and a documentary was subsequently made about it. Inspired by Sting’s Nothing Like the Sun and Soul Cages albums, it was more philosophical than it was political. The former actually interests me more.  I’m not the kind of artist who can make effective political statements. I’m more comfortable writing the music and lyrics and having som...

 

 Sacred and Profane  

 No Kings Rally - WWI Memorial       I'm most interested in the context of the event and the history of a place (particularly Oak Park, a liberal enclave since the 70s). These kinds of shots are difficult to get because you have to be at the ready and on the hunt. I've always said that your eyes take the best photos because things are happening quickly in the flow of life, and if you're armed with a camera, the shots have to be decisive and perfectly framed.  Street photography is a real skill which I don't have, or has to be practiced. There are always shots I regret not getting--like the teenage boy sitting in the Potbelly eating a sandwich watching the march. The facial expression is key: He's witnessing an event that is at the beginning of a new period in the US, watching people who are the age of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. There was another possible shot of a Carmen Ghia with people waving placards. I did get one of a vintage red Fia...

9/18/1993 Guy in subway playing a Turkish instrument–looks like a banjo, played like an oud. Had a formica fingerboard and a body about 6 inches deep made out of metal. Don’t know the tuning, 12 strings. This is what it is: 9/18/1999 At some point in the next 50 years, musicians will have to create music from scratch rather than create music based on just digital remnants, or new music will be based only on the surviving remnants, i.e. those that still physically exist in a medium that is still playable, and have stood the test of time in a cultural sense. (For example, Beatles recordings are likely to exist, but might not be part of the musical landscape, or become esoteric museum pieces.)  [9/18/2024: At 25 years, even non-musicians are generating music from digital remnants that we now know as LLMs and training sets. Music started to become more about playing recordings rather than instruments around 2000–two years before this entry. I recall at the time Sony had released the ...

 The seed:   The sprout. Will this get used/developed?   Atomic Disease (8-18-1948) by meta4s Atomic Disease (Horn Arrangement) by meta4s

 Unknown    

December 18ths  6/18/1997  Interesting that linguists have reduced all the languages in the world to just three, plus the Basque language, which is totally unique. It’s also ironic that changes in language take one or two generations. But the roots of certain words have remained intact for thousands of years.           6/18/1998 The reason that lyrics sometimes go unnoticed in a piece of music is that the music is so seductive but that doesn’t mean that the importance of the lyric together with the music is any less important. [6/18/2025: Pop music has always been about the sound and the beat, but the lyrics have to be singable (important), even if you’re not sure of the meaning–if there was an intended meaning at all. Sometimes you tune into the lyrics years or decades later. A friend of mine never knew that the female voice in I’m Not In Love was saying “Big boys don’t cry”. He thought it was a foreign language. Post-internet it’s easy to get backgro...

 

5/18/1995 (Eno Diary)  “Realized today I’ve spent three years gazing at computer screens and it has got me not very far. In my next studio, as an experiment, I’ll have no computer set-up. The thought of going in in the morning and not switching on is thrilling and daunting...." [5/18/2025: Yesterday, I created a piece of art that didn’t involve the internet, social media, or AI. It’s important to gauge how we feel when we use, or not use, technology, and then do more of that. You’re not on a hamster wheel. We can delude ourselves that hamster wheels are fixtures of life. Sadly, the avant-garde has been dying. It’s not like anyone’s making ‘pataphysical YouTube videos or performing Schwitters’ Ursonate , whereas these kinds of things were interesting to people at one point]. [5/18/2026: AI is now in the loop of our lives, whether we want it or not. You have to continue to do things manually. In music, I can be more experimental. AI is far too hands-off (hot), but it will become coo...

2/18/1978 From Confession of an Elitist : I've decided I'm a Generalist now! A Generalist? Yes. I thought that just about covered all grounds. It encompasses anything I wish to do, really. I find, for instance, I really want to paint seriously now, and not toy with it, and I am painting very seriously now, every available moment. 2/18/2025 Once you've been doing something for a long time, in any domain, you can alternate between styles. For example, now I'm experimenting with AI in music, and at the same time writing string quartets. If you've developed any kind of a skill, you don't want to let it go to seed while you explore new technologies. What you want is to set up two poles or two extremes and you can work within that range. For example, one extreme is writing in a 19th century style in music notation, and the other extreme using AI.   

 

1/18/1998 Was thinking about the exciting future of music amid its decline. [1/18/2025: Once you are in your 30s you begin to either completely drop out of culture (oblivious to anything that’s new, bad or good) or you take the good and leave the rest. I’m in the latter category. I never dropped out completely, but as anyone ages, regardless of generation, you’re seeing a decline in quality. This is the result of the march of postmodernism, which has now fully transformed culture. Once it reaches politics, anything goes. The idea of metamodernism is still too diffuse to say there is a real post-postmodernism period. It’s up to artists to take a stand on it, but it’s difficult because postmodernism is pretty exciting. David Lynch was mostly a postmodernist, but not at the expense of his influences from other film eras. Again, take what you can use, and leave the rest]. Discuss the philosophy of metamodernism and how it is currently being expressed in art and music.  1/18/2003 Video:...