Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

   The first edition ends at 3047 and this is the supplement. 3052. The door to jazz is through rhythm. If you don't like jazz, your body probably doesn't understand swing--or it actually does, and your mind gets in the way. 3055. Art allows you to see technology in a different way than the mainstream. 3057. You can't really play until you know how to play. 3059. Artists know what they want faster than what AI can tell them what they should want. 3060. Stop using a tool if it isn't producing interesting results for you. People are using AI as a tool and we don't consider whether it's interesting. It just mass-produces something. Imagine scissors were just invented. We'd try them on everything. This happened with cameras when they became affordable. 3074. Sometimes art is spiritual; Sometimes it doesn't have time for it. 3078. If I decide rock music is now a 'classical' music, I don't have to feel too old to play it. 3079. If music is too muc...

 AI-analysis of all the entries that contain the word "jazz" or "blues". (See description for notes)

   Songs are danced speech.--Alan Lomax [Updated 4/18/2026, Essay 5) Chat with the LLM  The Music of Language is a compilation of writings over the past decade on the connection between language and music. I'm in the camp of musicians who believe that music preceded language. I always understood it intuitively, and then later on it became more of a passionate intellectual pursuit. At the back of the book, as the appendix are what I’m calling “wordrums” (a portmanteau of “word” and “drum”), where the inherent rhythms in natural speech become musical and become seeds for the music. In the past, it was customary for songwriters to start with a title, and the title would have some kind of a rhythmic pattern to it, which would be the basis for the entire song. I still like to work this way. An AI-generated summary/analysis: *** *** Playlist of Examples:  *** Footnotes: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shave_and_a_Haircut      2. Ivo Popasov, “Bulchen...

 It's interesting how AI will summarize the things that you’ve said. Here I was just dictating my thoughts on how people interpret lyrics, which can intentionally be very random, and generated from cut-up a la William Burroughs. Personally, I like this approach, but it's interesting how one can stumble on something in a book ( Superbloom ) that relates to how you've been thinking about something, and AI will synthesize those thoughts. “Lyric writing, according to the sources, is an interesting art form where the meaning might not be immediately obvious. Unlike prose, where clarity of meaning is often the primary goal, in lyric writing, words must be shaped to be singable, not necessarily to mean something specific. This suggests that the sonic and rhythmic qualities of the words are prioritized, and literal meaning can take a secondary role. The source describes lyric writing as a mechanical process that can sometimes have different interpretations. This implies that the co...

    Both hardcover and paperback available at Amazon  A derivation from Dynaxiom , with a (mostly accurate) AI-generated analysis and summary:

  An AI-generated analysis of On Ar t, as a part of a 3-part book series, along with On Music and On Technology , derived from the Dynaxiom book. The cover design uses the Black White and Red theme.

 An LLM of my 2000 Diary. Ask 2000 From Three Presidents (Volume I): Clinton-Bush  

Perhaps you're reading this as a synchronistic evernt.  From the book The Tools , by Phil Stutz "On January 17, 1994, exactly one year [after the dream about an earthquake], the costliest earthquake in US history struck Los Angeles in the early hours before dawn. The building that house my office collapsed. Everything in it was pulverized. It also destroyed my belief system. It suddenly seemed that there were more things in heaven and earth than my philosophy had ever dreamed of. Here were the facts, two heart-opening events had occurred, the first on January 17,1992, the day my son was born, and the second on January 17, 1993 when I had the earthquake dream, and now on January 17, 1994 an actual earthquake had ripped through Los Angeles." 1/17/2025 On the genesis of the "Silencio" scene, where one idea leads to another, if you're ready to see the possibilities. Creativity is about being aware of them as they are happening. It's not an accident, it's...

 

 

 Chat with Anthony Townes , a character in Reset 2046 .  The album: Side 1: Side 2:

In progress: 35 years of musing on music in a slim 100-page volume. Images are the series of 12 from Chromatic Windows

    Available On Amazon NOVEMBER IMAGES Paperback Footnotes: 1. https://leebarry1.bandcamp.com/track/b5-waning-earth-november 2. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/38091/pg38091-images.html 3. https://app.box.com/s/nkhru74k57gcwp33qw45gpny3wtgjarx 4. https://anchor.fm/lee-barry/episodes/Music-For-Places-V-Music-For-Photographs-Full-Album-e19np15 5. https://youtu.be/qH-1Q75AC9s   6. https://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/afghanistan-lost-cause 7. https://youtu.be/dBmfhHEAryY 8. Video: https://youtu.be/9_8X9LMal7g 9. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-ancient-history-of-intelligent-machines/ 

11/1/1941   Moonrise, Hernandez is taken by Ansel Adams from a shoulder of highway US 84/US 285 in New Mexico. Became a track on Music For Places V:    AI-generated versions with me playing bass and keyboard parts against them, as a "hybrid" production.    ***   [11/1/2025: The music people listened to in 1941 was either classical, folk, or jazz. The whole idea of "ambience" comes from how films began being padded with atmosphere once synths started to be used].  "Ansel Adams was deeply trained in classical music and initially envisioned a career as a concert pianist before turning to photography. His immersion in music began at age 12, inspired by his neighbor Henry Cowell, who would later become a renowned avant-garde composer. Adams taught himself to play and read music, receiving lessons from Cowell and other distinguished teachers throughout his adolescence." [ More ]  11/1/1944 [Norman Lewis - Naples 44 ] The miserable news is that the cou...

  Back in 2019, I wrote a blog post titled Suburbs Exist For the Weekend . During the week, suburbs can be veritable ghost towns, but on the weekends they spring to life when people can be disabused of the daily grind. In that post, I used a photo taken by Robert Adams in 1970 taken during his trip through Colorado and other Western states. That photo of suburban tract homes probably wasn’t taken on a weekend but is emblematic of the bleakness of American suburbia, a generation after the postwar suburban boom circa 1950. The suburban routines of lawn mowing, barbecues, and so on, are the corollary of going out with a camera and taking snapshots and home movies as a part of that routine. Before smartphone cameras, photography probably was another exclusive weekend activity, and the photos perhaps had a visual vibe of having been taken on a weekend–or couldn’t have been taken during the week: Adults splashing in a backyard pool is decidedly a weekend activity. It wouldn’t be a Monday...

10/21/2004 People still remember the song sequences on albums. The more choice you have, the fewer things are fixed. I think it’s better if something is fixed because it’s one less decision you have to make. [10/21/2024: This is why I now do video albums. Human In The Loop is the latest. It can be played like a record sequentially, but you can move the “tone arm” around]. Possible new medium emerging: satellite radio with internet radio. (A paradigm shift, a la FM radio—how will it affect the creation of music?) [10/21/2024: Little did we know where this would all go.] [10/21/2025: Little do we know where anything will go. We didn't know where the internet would go, or social media, or AI. It's always a mixed bag. Some benefit hugely, some are oppressed by it]. [10/21/2026: AI-generation of music can create a glut of music that needs a shape to give it relevance. It can't be random anymore; It has to be grouped and packaged in some way. Even if it's a single, that sing...

    On September 14, 2017, I was predicting that the future of music would be driven by AI, and in some ways singing its praises, but on September 14, 2021, I was rather singing the praises of the book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: “Now my go-to book to support my cynicism about AI.” On Friday, September 16, 1816, Anne Lister arrives in Buxton (Derbyshire) for a few days stay, while 152 years later, on Friday, September 16, 1968, a British popular music ensemble is in the previously unfathomable “recording studio” recording While My Guitar Gently Weeps. 9 years later, one of the Beatles’ major influences, Elvis Presley, dies. On September 16, 1997, it was the 20th anniversary of his death and I got caught in a deluge where it rained for 2-1/2 hours, and diaried, “The second coming of Elvis”. On September 16, 2010, I discovered two keys on the seat next to me on the El. “The supernaturalist in me wants to ascribe meaning to this, but someone may have simply lost their k...

  On August 8, 2022, the FBI raided Mar a Lago--the same day as the Nixon resignation in 1973. On August 11, 1956, Jackson Pollock died when he overturned his Oldsmobile 88 convertible while driving drunk, while on August 11, 1995, Brian Eno was at Jimmy’s Disco: “Possibly one of the most hateful places I’ve ever been. All those rich young people, so chic, and thin as two planks. A vodka? £34. A Heineken? £24. I wanted to throw a grenade in there. Just, one, please”. On August 11, 2022, I wrote (about art): “Real art” is based on our universal sense of what art can be. This was greatly expanded in the 20th century and continues”. On August 12, 1969, The Beatles were in the studio doing final overdubs on Not Guilty , and on August 12, 1997, I wrote, “We should play God because it might be fun to pretend” But the question is: would we really be pretending?”, on August 12, 2017, I take a photograph and title it “inequality”. On August 14, 2017, I was predicting that the future of musi...