Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

 

 America 250 + Calder (1973)  

  Ideal Diner, Perth Amboy, New Jersey (George Tice) Would-be silhouette The shadow he could get One of the characters is dreaming I think it's the girl in the diner Civil rights activist Now she's on a list One of the characters is dreaming I think it's the girl in the diner Sussing out the blue key In Mulholland Drive One of the characters is dreaming I think it's the girl in the diner  Copyright 2026 Lee Barry, Rights in lyrics reserved Two Blues and a Pop:

  3/25/1997   I did a count of all the pieces I’ve written since approximately 1983, when I bought my first keyboard and 4-track, and I now have almost 300 songs and other compositions on about 150 cassettes, much of it jazz and experimental music.   I like guitar players who approach the instrument from lots of different angles, where you don’t have to always play it as if it were only a guitar. (Andy Summers, Robert Fripp come immediately to mind)—the “painting” approach, where you use different “brush” techniques. 3/25/1998 Black-out poetry About a Girl  He couldn’t get The right mood She explained That it was about a girl Waiting for her lover In a motel room She explained  That it was about a girl 3/25/2021   Musicians seem to like things that are really technical. I’m still surprised to see so many people getting into music theory and they want the real complex things with chord changes that are like mathematical formulas. But they’re not mathematic...

  Deangelo's World Rapbrary is a living archive founded by Chicago-based rapper, librarian, and cultural worker Roy Kinsey, rooted in the belief that hip-hop is literature and libraries are cultural sanctuaries.   

*** AI-generated tracks with the same strophic lyric schema. What I want is to have AI work from a MIDI file and match syllables with rhymes. 

 

 Lighthouse Monolith   Lighthouse  

    This is kind of a silly thing based on an auction barker, an isometric rhythm where a lyric schema can be mapped over it. Each word in brackets can be swapped out with any word one through ten, omitting seven because it has two syllables and is not isometric. Perhaps an algorithm could be written that would do this in an LLM: [One] dollar bid now [two] now [two] will you give me [two] [Two] dollar bid now [three] now [three] will you give me [three] [Three] dollar bid now [four] now [four] will you give me [four] [Four] dollar bid now [five] now [five] will you give me [five] [Five] dollar bid now [six] now [six] will you give me [six] [Eight] dollar bid now [nine] now [nine] will you give me [nine] [Nine] dollar bid now [ten] now [ten] will you give me [ten] Possible Groove: Barker by meta4s Some Silly AI Versions:

9/25/1999             On the future of music listening: Now that we have the capability to compile songs and make our own collections, we need to weed out all this similar-sounding material: “Techno with samples of monks—already have one of those”. This will put the onus on the composers to come up with new and exciting material that will stand the test of time.             [9/25/2024: I realized at popular tourist locations millions (or perhaps billions) of people take pictures of the same things, and I had the idea for a camera app that would automatically delete photos that had already been taken, or would apply an effect of some kind to make them different. This is probably very easy now with AI. But the current data sets are full of cliches and they would all be removed if you made the instruction to do so.] [9/25/2025: If you generate a song with your words, then replace the words, and use those words to re-gene...

  8/25/2016 Teenagers seem to not like classical music because pop music is inherently more fun and social. In contrast, classical music can be too heady and intellectual. I never liked it as a teenager (or just wasn’t exposed to it), then discovered it in my early 20s through various rock bands/artists that used orchestras on some of their work (Beatles, Led Zeppelin), or directly composed for orchestra, such as Frank Zappa (influenced by Varese, Ives, etc.) It is interesting to note that 1960s pop and rock were actually heavily influenced by jazz and classical, as it was what was played on the radio at the time. In a sense, the “pop” music for a teenager in 1960 was probably jazz, blues, classical, and big band.          8/25/2021        If you think of music as a symmetrical system in which pitches are arranged horizontally (melody) and vertically (harmony) and given different durations (rhythm), then there can be millions of possibil...

The black-out lyric of the day:   Finally splurged and got the Finale music notation program, which is supposed to be state of the art. I am cutting my teeth on two piano fantasias by PL. Also re-copying the string quartet I did when I was in college, in hopes that a cello player friend of mine will take an interest. Anything beats copying music by hand. (In most cases.) [7/25/2025: Alas, Finale is now defunct, superseded by Dorico].  7/25/2015             Park Piano, Washington Square Park, Bughouse Square [with field audio ]                       [7/25/2026: Alas, they no longer have the debates. Telling of our current age]. 7/25/2016 Jazz sounds like an art, but it’s really more like a science. The problem now is that it can sometimes sound too much like a science. I’d make the same comment about visual art, even though I love using procedures borrowed from science.  7/25...

December 25ths  6/25/1886 (Tom Sullivan Diary--AI-generated with edits) We are no longer becoming. We have become.  The lesson of the flightless cormorant: Humans are also in the process of becoming something totally different. We lose abilities and gain others. At the tavern O'Malley spoke of organizing again. "They can't kill an idea." [ Source ]  6/25/1998 Chicago teacher/singer-songwriter uses songs to teach math. This is not a new concept; novelty songs and nursery rhymes have been used for ages as learning tools. Interesting thing about it is that it’s music used as a utility, stripped of its cultural function, which is useful in that it indicates that music is not just something we can just discard after we’ve “read” it. It’s nice that there is a use for music other than for entertainment or an emotional outlet. [6/25/2025: Relates to my idea about a history class that was about learning history through writing songs ]  Interesting documentary on PBS on Rod Se...

A soul groove idea ( Wordrum ) AI-generated tracks, the first SF soul like a Tower of Power, the second more Fela Kuti: We're cooking the toast Butter later We're cooking the roast S'mother later We're making the most Somethin' greater We're cooking the toast

2/25/1997 Final mix of Force of Will . [2/25/2025: 28 years later, the AI-generated version]: [2/25/2026: I still like my own version, even played on a uke. Not that the AI version isn't interesting in its own way, but you probably couldn't reduce it to chords and melody, and if you did, the result wouldn't be musically interesting on its own. That's typically the problem with AI music in general. I suppose over time, the training data will make the harmony more interesting. But humans will always be more effective--the reason being time itself. There is a difference between the creative moment with a guitar and a creative moment waiting for the result from typing a prompt]. 2/25/1998 Sitting in Starbucks listening to 1970s groove jazz, Herbie Mann/ Herbie Hancock, realizing that much of hip-hop and rap is based on the two-bar grooves that were the basis for long psychedelic improvisations. Also interesting that at this time (1974), Muhammad Ali was becoming famous and...

1/25/2006 Hamas wins majority in Palestinian elections. If you promote the idea of democracy, why is this such a surprise to the US?  In one day, the boundaries have all been reconfigured. Now you have turf , not regions or countries.     Excerpt Library (Science):   "Discuss political boundaries" 1/25/2012 On the creative process: what is the action chain of thinking? What results from sensory input?             Idea: An album of songs set in the next Awakening (Second Turning), circa 2045-2050. [Eventually became the 2046 album]. 1/25/2023 Words and phrases are always driving my musical ideas because the words can already have a music in them. At the primitive level, you should be able to write songs with just percussion and the voice. All the melody and harmony can be mapped over it. Lyrics to music is bottom-up and more improvisatory and music to lyrics is top-down and less spontaneous—although once...

12/25/1924   Can't get any better than this--Christmas amongst architects and musicians.  12/25/1997              A Reverend said that he thought that dancing was even more powerful than language in terms of shared spiritual experience, where all muscles are moving together.  Excerpt Library (Music) : "Discuss dancing as a manifestation of the spiritual."  12/25/2000 Christmas solar eclipse this morning at 11:20. Everything bathed in dim sunlight. There won't be another Christmas eclipse until the year 2307. An excellent example of random variation, where certain objects interact at specific points in time, and happen at unique moments. 12/25/2006 James Brown died. He was the guy that popularized the notion of “The One” and awareness (and possibility) where lots of syncopation in music, and the treatments of all instruments as percussion instruments. (Bass is really a tuned drum).  12/25/2022 Interesting: Christmas African Dru...

10/25/1914 Wittgenstein receives “suspicious” news that Paris had fallen. He felt pleased at first then realized it sounded absurd. (“Such incredible news is always a bad sign”.) Thinks they were under gunfire from Russians, but was just an airplane. Spends the night in Tarnobrzeg then tomorrow morning to Szczucin. [10/25/2024: 90 years later, perhaps on the brink of another World War, the fog of it will be a different kind of fog. We are experiencing it now because the pillars of journalism as we once knew them have collapsed. There’s a continuous cognitive dissonance between what you hear or read in one place, and an alternate universe in another. (Feeling pleased at first, then realizing it sounded absurd.) Whenever I walk past the Tribune Tower, now converted into luxury residences, I think about that collapse. I was also there when it was being "renovated" (2019)]   10/25/1944  [Norman Lewis - Naples 44] It is astonishing to witness the struggle of this city so shattered...