Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

Technology is always a part of the flow. (Once you have a skill and you've used it for decades you can always hop back on the bike, unlike many things we have done with computers. You can learn software, but the software is always requiring updating your knowledge of its new functions. If you want to develop skill for a lifetime, choose the more manual skills that don't involve tools that are always changing. Even new power tools will get in the way if using your manual skill because you have to stop and devote attention to them. I have yet to learn the Dorico software which replaced Finale. If for some reason Finale stopped working I could still continue writing manually, but it would be going back to the stone age, and I'd have to trade my creative time with software training. So the happy medium is to have just enough skill with a range of new and old tools. Most artists need some kind of handicap assistance. AI is another tool that assists, just as MIDI did for me in th...

It's at this time of year that you begin noticing a change in the light. In the Northern Hemisphere, the mornings are darkening and twilight comes earlier. Summer is a "plain" or "plateau" of anticipation: everything is in full bloom, and the leaves won't be changing for another 2 months, the days begin to get perceptibly shorter towards the end of July. But in March, there's an anticipation of Spring, and by the end of May, the anticipation of summer. September is a feeling of heading back down the hill.   Changing of Light, Sun, and Moon 0179: Compares poetry to the moon rather than the sun , as it " reflects light rather than shines directly " . 0352: States that " Light never ages; it just travels farther " . 0522: Reflects on the " earthrise " captured during the 1969 moon landing as a compelling moment of perspective . 0570: Observes that looking at the sun makes one realize it is the force that " created yo...

Mostly thoughts on AI music drawn from Volume III . As robotic as these podcasts are, they are useful in analysis.  

   Theory is a way to fully understand something, but not to the extent that you could successfully apply it. Applying knowledge requires giving shape so that you can examine it. You could have ideas for a sculpture, and you could know lots of theory on some other subject that could be applied conceptually, but attention has to be paid to that particular form, because that's what others see. In music, you can know theory, and you can apply it to form, but it's a question of theory serving the idea.  I recall an anecdote about The Beatles discovering the B7 chord, and it opened up new possibilities. You could later learn that it's the dominant chord in E minor, and you could continue to study functional harmony because it's interesting, but it still has to be applied, or simply used in the flow of your work. Harmony is, in fact, functional and is ready to be applied, but how does it serve the art? Jazz is harmonic (or vertical) by its nature, and theory guides its compos...

  Entries 3000-3500 The LLM for some of the entries 

  Entries 0001-2999 (Paperback) (Volumes I and II combined)  Entries 0001-2999 (Kindle) 3000- 3340 (Kindle Only) LLM for the entire 3000 Series going forward   *** AI Videos:  

If the world decides to go crazy it isn't likely that you can avoid the wild party for long. There's always going to be noise coming from that party keeping you awake at 3AM. You'll grow tired of always having to use earplugs or white noise to mask it.  The thing of it is, we must live with the living.— Montaigne From the book Third Ear, Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening: “I found myself unable to ignore a steady pounding rhythm from somewhere in my neighborhood. It wasn't exactly a mechanical banging or jackhammering or chopping, but some relentless concussion. At times it seemed as though my body was being hit over and over. Later, the noise gave way to the whining of a leaf blower. I wanted so much to tune it all out, delete it, and yet I had to surrender to it being there, around me and in some sense upon me, invasive and unavoidable. Two nights later, I was awakened by the roar of my furnace that had kicked on by some automatic setting I don't re...

   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...

  Fishing Near Winchelsea, Sussex , John Horace Hooper   10/5/1899 (Rye, East Sussex, England)             (William James Diary) Letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman:             ...The land is bathed in greenish-yellow light and misty drizzle of rain. The little town, with its miniature brick walls and houses and nooks and coves and gardens, makes a curiously vivid and quaint picture, alternately suggesting English, Dutch, and Japanese effects that one has seen in pictures, all exceedingly tiny.... Prose converted to a poem or lyric: [Discuss the similarities and differences between, prose, poetry, and lyrics] The land is bathed In greenish-yellow light And misty drizzle of rain The little town With its houses and coves Curiously vivid and quaint English, Dutch, and Japanese effects All exceedingly tiny     10/5/2000             Revolution in Serbia. Milosevic overthrown...

9/27/2021                        Finally reading one of Neil Peart’s books, Roadshow about their 2004 tour. I liked the bit about “tryism”. I tried the “trying not to try” (wu wei) and never got anything done and never led anywhere interesting. Even if you simply coast to the next destination, you find yourself trying something during the day, regardless of whether it’s creative or not. What I find remarkable about him is how he can be both intellectual and also do the hard work of playing shows every day for six months. I always thought it was about compartmentalization, but in fact, you can do both simultaneously.     *** There was an apparently young bass player on Quora and his question was: “I’m scared of the fingerboard and the strings because I’m afraid I won’t be good at it...” This seems so foreign to me that someone would be thinking that way. Perhaps it’s the initial motivation, and when that moti...

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

9/19/2001  Bill Moyers interviewed Julie Taymor on TV. She posited the idea of a “United Nations of Art”, and denounced “perverse uses of religion”.  Now technology can be our savior rather than our God. I think we’ll see lots of creativity and innovation. [9/19/2026: What a difference 25 years makes].   9/19/2005 Interview with Steve Reich on NPR. He was talking about “ voicetruments ”.  9/19/2012 Dynaxiom idea: To a large degree, the power of music is to compel you to listen to something repeatedly. [9/19/2025: Saturation is the key, but that saturation involves “soaking” which I think is about 3 times listening to something. As a writer and producer you are marinating in music, which can be an over-saturation]      9/19/2024 Idea: Frame this: 1600. Aphorisms are words in a frame.    And so it is...                                         ...

9/8/1998 Jazz musicians had radical intentions but they still were fluent in the language of music. [9/8/2025: That is, jazz may sound like it’s completely free form, but the players are well-versed in jazz theory. Sometimes you don’t need, or want, to use it]. Historic day in baseball--McGuire hits 62 home runs. Studio: Mix on Saved By the Sunrise . [2026: How AI spins it ]  9/8/1999 Has anyone thought of, or is anyone doing classical/rap fusion? If not, I'd invent it. [9/8/2025: It probably had been done even in 1999–as Remix–but since rap is “meterless” the music would need to have no bar lines, or the music would be built around beats]. 9/8/2002 The Arts merge at the level of inspiration, but diverge at the level of craft. Painting can inspire music, but they use different tools.  9/8/2016             ACRONYMS , 9x27 inches, acrylic on cardboard, hardware, mounted on panel.  9/8/2024 Every generation has their “griots”: Silents had P...

9/6/2006  Studio: “LaGrange Point”. The string tremulants give a sense of motion, with French Horn swells placed a minor second above, giving a sense of drama and foreboding. As film music, it could be used in a penultimate scene to a battle of some kind. Here, it gives one the sense of being in a large cavernous space. [9/6/2026: Suno blocked an upload of this. Ownership is now based on the sound of a piece of music, not the actual music that can be reduced to notation in a score. It's full of dissonances that aren't cliche. What it hears are the cinematic “John Williams” score cliches: Timpani, horn swells, and snare drum. It also blocks similar lyric lines but again, the cliche of them. Perhaps in the future artists will own words, just as colors can be copyrighted .  Now those claims are stupidly made by algorithms with no justification or evidence. It just is. Even a microsecond of a piece of music is enough to identify a recording]. 9/6/2012        ...

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 8ths   7/8/2000 The arts are like a big subduction zone, where ideas, products and so on are taken under, and rise again as new “crust”. Interesting bit in an article: “The excessive use of technology not founded on logic has done real damage where we hoped it would help.” [7/8/2025: This was in the early hours of the internet. The issue of logic in new technologies is evergreen and universal: It seemed logical that the internet would be like a card catalog–obviating the need to go to libraries to do research. It still serves that function but it went off those rails. The same question persists: why do we need AI when we did fine without it, and would continue to be fine with older technologies].   7/8/2022 It might be too difficult to read certain things into cultural objects without the proper context. “Honesty” to the composer is not always what’s important when you’re creating the work because it might all be a mechanical operation of pushing notes (or sounds)...

Another album in the Songday series created with AI, using the same lyrics for each of the five songs.  The lyrics are based on Dynaxiom 0408, “Beauty finds itself and its beholder”. The original idea was a piece of music titled The Frequency Holder. A “frequency holder”  is a term coined by Eckhart Tolle as “someone who embodies and emanates a high vibrational frequency, often associated with presence, awareness, and peace, contributing to the collective consciousness”. .It's ironic that this music is pretty hard-edged vis-a-vis its spiritual nature.  I called this music “Concrete Metal” based on my visual vibe of Brutalist architecture. Some of the buildings are actually quite beautiful (to me), So there can be a “brutal beauty”, something “Butalist”, a play on “Brutalist”.  Writing music with AI is a different animal because the words are squeezed into riffs, and so it’s a top-down control. When you write music manually with just a guitar or piano, the melodic and...

  Sometimes when I hear something interesting in AI-generated music I'll transcribe it and arrange it in some fashion. There's an interesting minor chord a minor second below the tonic chord, which is something odd I would never do, but AI plays by different rules.  The AI version with over-the top guitar soloing:     The "short", only 30 seconds long with a flute playing the melody: The lyrics are derived from Dynaxiom 0408: Beauty finds itself and its beholder, then fleshed out. Beauty finds itself And its beholder When you trust yourself As a frequency holder  Beauty hides itself It could be bolder When you find your Self Over your shoulder Beauty makes itself In a linear order Chaos comes to rest At the edge and the border        

3/12/2002 Jazz sounds like an art, but it's really a science. [Perfect examples are the Coltrane Cycle and Harmolodics ]   3/12/2003 On Chicago Riverwalk (the old one)                     3/12/2004 Went to Lee Bontecou exhibit at MCA. She gave up on the art scene 20 years ago and now they’ve discovered the oeuvre and she’s emerged from obscurity. I detected some sour grapes here, i.e. “the world doesn’t care about my work anyway, I want to just drop out.” But this work is really exciting. Liked the poetry with the words stripped out, leaving only the punctuation. (Cage did this with Merce Cunningham, taking out the consonants and leaving in the vowels.   3/12/2010 Pink Floyd wins a court battle with EMI with a ruling that prevents the record company from selling single downloads on the Internet from the group's concept albums. The last bastion of the album format proves that it still matters. [3/12/2025: The Playlist approxima...