Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

    Curio No. 62A by meta4s

 I’ve always been restless and eclectic. I never really stick with one thing for very long. It’s not that I lose interest and never want to do it again; it’s just that there are too many other things to explore. You could say that it’s kind of impulsive and that I’m not thinking things through, but as an artist, I don’t think it would be very enjoyable or interesting to want to stick to one thing. There are artists who have only done one thing, and I admire their work. The artist I always cite is Peter Halley , who’s done essentially the same piece his entire career. I know lately he’s been doing other things, and there have been other singularly focused artists who have branched out. But I’m different because I do lots of different things and alternate between them, sometimes doing them all simultaneously. Over the past 5 or 10 years, I’ve kind of returned to skill, having spent quite a bit of time doing things that are more abstract and postmodern, which don’t involve a lot of sk...

    Black-out lyric idea: An example of how to use AI in the flow of composition, starting with a black-out lyric, generating the  music, then deriving another piece from the AI musical elements, in this case a classical piece.   The angular harmony is what interested me to want to reverse engineer this. AI music is terrible at harmonic invention, but sometimes you get these kinds of "happy accidents". I put that in quotes because I don't think they're either in this case: Firstly, because the harmony is sadly mysterious, and secondly, because I think AI-generated content isn't capable of generating them. The only way I see them happening is if they are synchronistic in some way, where it presents a solution in the moment in the flow of time, just as something happens at the moment of totality. It's obvious I was using a Pink Floyd vibe.

  Based on the diary entry:   5/21/1997 Cold/windy, 50 It’s been such a cold spring that the birch trees don’t even have buds yet. Such a cold spring The birch trees are bare   Seed:     

  Song about the Music Box Theater in Wrigleyville in Chicago. The small black box theater had lumpy seats and terrible sight-lines. You'd have to watch a film constantly shifting your head.  Seed entry: 2/21/1998 John Lennon said that whatever changes we go through, whether they be permanent or not, last forever because it brought the relationship to a point where both people changed, and that change would not have been possible without the relationship.             Film: Mother and Son by Russian filmmaker. Visually seductive. I would have liked to have seen more image manipulation rather than long static scenes of them in existential discourse. Not much of a score, which gave me lots of ideas of how I do it. Film was in a small theater at the Music Box, replete with lumpy seats and poor sight lines. Funny to watch people before the show switching seats to audio while looking at the back of someone’s head.  Assembled lyric: Went to se...

 

On the other side of the year 9/21/1998 Reading Umberto Eco essay on analysis of the cult status of Casablanca. He said the movie was an aggregation of lots of different elements—a movie made of other movies.             [This is intertextuality–what LLMs now are. If we used LLMs exclusively, everything would be derived from something else, not arising from ideas that humans have. But even then, many ideas have already been thought of. Google resolved that 25 years ago, where you could look up something to see if it had already been done.]               9/21/2009 Went to performance of Turkish military ensemble at Millennium Park. I don’t know why but I have an affinity for Turkish folk song and Taqsim—almost a form of jazz riffing, but at the same time ritualistic and devotional. On Van Buren at Wells, there’s this seedy tavern (Cal’s), and in one of the windows they made this strange “shrine” with a broken gui...

 Summer Thursday  

  Strange Days (August 21) by meta4s Remote Control (August 21) by meta4s

8/21/2017 Total eclipse, Columbia, Illinois. Ever since my early Floyd days I had wanted to experience this. It is the most numinous experience to be under the shadow of the looming moon. It’s a 360-degree “sunset”. I only took a few snaps and didn’t want to be distracted.                         8/21/2022  Artificially created work makes for nice prototypes. Sometimes the prototypes can stand alone as art, but it has to function as art, like a readymade. In terms of work, perhaps AI can serve as the artisan, doing the mechanical and repetitive parts, and the Artist can delegate those tasks. But we’ve had that capability since the early days of computers with macros and so on. For art that is more generic, automation could suffice. It’s the art that artists might not want to spend their time on, or they could use the automations as a basis for unique treatments. [8/21/2025: Yesterday, I watched a video of a live performanc...

January 21sts 2 studios, 26 years apart: 7/21/1969 (Beatles Studio Diary) John hadn’t offered a new song since April and did vocal takes on Come Together. John sings while clapping his hands with tape echo, and immediately after each time he sang the line “shoot me”. On the finished record you only hear the word “shoot” because the bass covers “me”.  7/21/1998 Working up lyrics for "Spooky", now "Saved by the Sunrise". Used an idea snippet from list of lyric fragments which Pat and I then fleshed out. I suggested we do several drafts, one of them quasi-religious and another in a foreign language. Somehow I hear Cesaria Evora singing this.  7/21/2015 Moonlight Cafe   7/21/2022 It is true that jazz is more “intellectual” as much as I want to avoid making it pejorative. But like the “Mozart Effect” it won’t make you smarter just by listening to it as a form of hypnosis. Perhaps there is something in the harmonic density that makes it sound smarter than other things. Bu...

7/21/1969 (Beatles Studio Diary)             John hadn’t offered a new song since April and did vocal takes on Come Together. John sings while clapping his hands with tape echo, and immediately after each time he sang the line “shoot me”. On the finished record you only hear the word “shoot” because the bass covers “me”. 

A piece of music derived from the rhythm of the phrase, "Cross-written letter from Annie Lister", also using the lyrics from The Letter by the Box Tops as a parallel or "cross-written" lyric. Lister's letter was dated June 21, 1824, 200 years ago.  It was 140 years after that there was a "psychedelic" music played on instruments that you would "plug in". Back in the 1820s, "popular" music consisted of (in Anne Lister's world) going to performances of solo flute music, then going to purchase the sheet music to learn how to play it. String Arrangement: 200 Years (Strings) by meta4s The Short (Single):

An example of going from prose to poetry to lyric. AI music generation is a challenge because you have to take so much out in order for it to work with the algorithms. It's an interesting process, but if I were to create a song manually, it certainly would not have this kind of simplistic harmony, but it does work as a finished recording.  Seed:  4/21/2022 New idea inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide For Getting Lost, particularly the “Blue Of Distance” bit. The prose sounded musical. The poem: The blue on the horizon Is a special place where light unfolds It is a deeper space; there's more sky to hold But it is deep and cold And in the deep and cold it rolls In the deep and cold it rose Touch the soil The soil, the land Touch the water Then touch the sand As you catch the sun And walk the beach Heard from on the cliffs An echo's reach

On the other side of the year 3/21/2001   Piece on NPR about Paul Horn’s new solo flute disc recorded in the Taj Mahal. The interviewer asked, “How is this different from all the other thousands of new age recordings?” “It has a sense of place”, he said. If you don’t know the context in which it was recorded in India, you wouldn’t know the difference. A stereo recording obviously captures an immersive environment such as the Taj Mahal: You have to physically be in the space to get the full impact of this kind of work. This is the type of piece that makes a recording superfluous.   [4/2021: An interesting play on words for Music For Places would be “Music For Palaces”. Sometimes music requires a place and recordings can provide that by padding the music in some way with the use of some kind of an effect or reverb. Otherwise it’s just too flat and reverb is a way to not only add a space but it also decorates the music and creates a production “look”, as there would be a “look” o...

2/21/1998             John Lennon said that whatever changes we go through, whether they be permanent or not, last forever because it brought the relationship to a point where both people changed, and that change would not have been possible without the relationship.             Film: Mother and Son by Russian filmmaker. Visually seductive. I would have liked to have seen more image manipulation rather than long static scenes of them in existential discourse. Not much of a score, which gave me lots of ideas of how I do it. Film was in a small theater at the Music Box, replete with lumpy seats and poor sight lines. It’s so funny to watch people before the show playing musical chairs to audio, while looking at the back of someone’s head.  *** As a "redacted" lyric/poem:             *** Reduced to lyrics: Went to see a movie Visually seductive Long static scenes In the music box Too ha...

1/21/2000             Some say the web is overhyped. I think it’s underutilized and used for the wrong things.  [1/21/2025: One technology that proved not to be hyped is cloud computing].  [1/21/2026: As a technology matures from its infancy or "pet trick" phase, flaws and defects begin to emerge--the first one that too many people are doing it and it makes it too unserious. The reason that art mediums are pronounced dead is for this reason. They are rather injured--not dead]      1//21/2008 As more and more artists realize that our strength is in our solidarity, we can produce and publish our own recordings, and efficiently market them using the myriad tools now available on the internet.               We should all be grateful that the music business gravy train is dead anyway, and we can move on with better ideas such as the fee-based model for music consumers.  1/21/2013 ...

Design Museum of Chicago: Letters Beyond Form: Chicago Types