Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

Photographs for (AI) music (Walker Evans)  Blind is based on Dynaxiom 3384: Nostalgia can make us blind to the shadows. Back To Egypt is a re-make of a 1998 song, done in a Blues/Gospel style. It's interesting to hear "someone else" cover your songs.

A piece generated from a few of my Dynaxioms on photography. 2006. Photos are confection for memory; You can't avoid being seduced by them. You want to forget, but the beautiful photo haunts you forever. If you lost a great city, you should destroy all the old photos as well. [Anything can be reconstructed from memory, and gives room for innovation that wouldn't have been there in the first version]. (9/12/2001) 0023. Sometimes history books (and films) say more about history than history itself. Recording history is like remembering a dream--with fragments stitched together into a narrative that develops a life of their own.   Before it was celluloid A record and a trace A picture on a postcard The fading of a place We see with the eyes of the heart Can you see me as I am? Vision sacralized The divining of a plan Photos are confection for memory You can't avoid being seduced You want to forget But the beautiful photos Haunt you forever Figments of imagination Emulsion of e...

2393: Life Finds a Place. Life finds a place Where the roots might go It lets itself in Lets itself go Extremophiles Deeper than you know In the crushing darkness The red light shows To the far reaches In the depths of the sea Far below the surface Roots of the tree Either on the Earth Or on the Mars Life finds a place With a wish on a star It's reading the rocks From cover to cover Finding a place From under the tundra To the far reaches In the depths of the sea Far below the surface Roots of the tree  Copyright 2026 Lee Barry, Rights in lyrics reserved  

  If art never aged or wasn't judged by time How much would be left?  How much would survive? Aesthetic erosion of the coast by the sea If we just left, how much would there be? A picture is a sum of destruction Beauty as a form of reduction A picture is a frame of construction Beauty as a form and a function Art exists as a record of the world In cuneiform or figures on a mural A palimpsest, laid to rest Beauty is a pattern that connects A picture is a sum of destruction Beauty as a form of reduction A picture is a frame of construction Beauty as a form and a function  Copyright 2026 Lee Barry. Rights in lyrics reserved.    *** 0260. Beauty is the pattern that connects. 0774. If beauty=form, then function follows form (art/design for its own sake). If beauty=function, then form follows function (things that ‘work beautifully’). If function follows form in a continuous loop you can have continuous beauty until function fails. What used to work beautifully would ...

A lyric has to start somewhere. In this case, it was this entry, then a rhythm sketched in a notebook. AI makes it easy because you're disabused of the (tedium of) recording. Not that recording isn't creative in itself, but AI at least gives you a prototype. Personally, none of these AI spins are something I would do, and I do have my own version of this. AI was also used in the lyric-writing, using an LLM of my entire lyric notebook and the Dynaxioms, so it's essentially a "Dynaxiom song" or an "assembled" lyric with bits coming from several sources. 0132. A 'quiet faith' is a better faith. If people can't hear you they won't try to disagree or try to shoot it down.   0333. Asking 'why' indicates there's a knowledge gap. Saying 'why not' puts [blind] faith before knowledge. That's the essence of 'Just Do It'. (What's the gap between blind faith and intuition?)  3/2/2005   I like the new ad campaign for...

A song seed based on Dynaxiom 3241: Just because you said it yourself doesn't mean you'll always believe it yourself. [You might have said something 10 or 20 years ago and might have moved on. The whole purpose of the Dynaxioms is that they are dynamic, and can be continually edited, or reimagined in music]. How will it evolve?     

Groove for the phrase "Where do all the things we forgot go?" (Dynaxiom 0498 ). Anything can have a rhytmicity if you work with it, and supports the idea that music is a bottom-up phenomenon from drumming and the vocalizations that may have accompanied it in the ancient world. This could be used for a jazz piece of some kind, with horns doing the "stabs". 

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...

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 ...

8/13/2016 We hate ear worms, but they constitute the “encyclopedia of similarity” that we use to make comparisons. How often is our first response to something new “It reminds me of...”             Somehow I got infected by an ear worm of Turning Japanese by The Vapors the other day out of nowhere. Then later on there was a song playing in a store that sounded just like it. 8/13/2018 Time spent practicing doesn’t necessarily equate with artistic merit. Most rock musicians throughout history only spent enough time to be as good as the musicians they admired, and some went beyond that and became cultural icons. What’s missing now might be soul, and a spiritual feeling in the music. You can’t practice that—you have to develop an inner life first.     I think jazz is a music that is made better the more it is practiced and studied. Musicians who had an interest in jazz, or dabbled in it, usually became better musicians, as its roots are dee...

8/11/1998 Book of interviews by Bill Duckworth, "Thinking Music"...section about Phil Glass. Interesting that he studied for years with Boulanger and then did something completely different. Lesson: Do something completely different and forget about theory.  [8/11/2025: I’ve had a change about postmodern approaches to music, but not in visual art. “Anything goes” better in art than in music–at least for me at this point. Art generally is easier from a craft standpoint if all your focus is on ideas and concepts–which is different from generating art with zero art direction. With conceptual art, you are only the art director and the work is fabricated. With AI music, you are the producer only in the sense that you write prompts and curate the results. There is a fabrication process but there are no humans in the loop who are not anonymous or invisible. This is the biggest issue with AI music. Who are these musicians?]      8/11/2014 Bass players and those into fishing-...

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...

Antipode: September 20ths 3/20/2016   Film: My Beautiful Broken Brain . What better producer than David Lynch? When a brain changes it shows new “films” on the screen of consciousness. What this might suggest is that AIs that are anthropomorphized are by default “broken”, yet have recoveries and setbacks. They can be best described through the metaphor of film and will run on millions of little “film clips”. There is a common correlation between visual disturbances and film effects, some of it done in After Effects.  3/20/2021 I'm currently at Scoville Park. It's about 55 degrees, and obviously it's sunny with blue skies. About two blocks behind me is the Hemingway birth home. The boyhood home is a couple of blocks away on Iowa. The reason I brought it up is that I have started to sport this gray beard now, and in this particular pose, I'm sort of looking like him. And I wonder if I should shave my beard.   ***  In order to be a good musician, music has to be do...

An AI-generated song based on Dynaxiom 1960: "Everyone can be a revolution in themselves: Change your life and change the world", with an expanded lyric, transcribed with a string arrangement. The AI melodies are usually pretty good. I particularly like the "Somewhere else, not somewhere less" line, meaning "I want to make change, but not less than where I am", or a "somewhereless"--a "no place". The song is obviously about individualism, but perhaps in the Jungian definition.  You can play them at the same time and the results are "interesting" in a pandiatonic way. Not Somewhere Less (Strings) by meta4s

10/19/1998 There has to be an intimate connection between the music and lyrics, such that when the vocal is removed you can hear how it plugs into the music. ( Like hearing an inner harmony).         [10/19/2024: When I stopped singing my own songs around 2000, I kept writing them with lyrics, but they were left as instrumentals. I’m still doing it with the current music, driven by what I call “wordrums”, words that become the core rhythmic riff]. "Discuss lyric writing"   10/19/2003 Beauty finds itself and its beholder. [Became Dynaxiom 0408, and today’s Songday, Beauty Finds Itself] This is interesting because it was used as a Dynaxiom, which became a Songday, and also is music for a place, the Indiana Dunes, so it's cinematic in that way. They are also on Sundays.  Orchestral treatment:  The AI-Generated version(s):    10/19/2009 First sunny day in weeks, 58 degrees  Drove out to the lake and climbed the dunes. Conversations wi...

On the Other Side of the Year  8/8/1998 “Fate is a vehicle that gets you where you’re going.”  (Dynaxiom 0256) 8/8/2000 I had a dream I had visited a poet, an elderly woman about 60 years old. She was sitting on a bed with all of her incunabula scattered around her. There was one document that was dated 1942, and was a letter from a former lover.  A cinematic treatment: A Short (Single): 8/8/2020 Caustic Shadows:   [Became the cover of Some August ]                                       8/8/2024  I have an eye for shadows in photography so I notice them right away. Similarly in music, I have an ear for “sound shadows” where something will coincide with something in real time, such as squeaking brakes fitting in with music that’s playing. If you don’t have a “camera” at the ready, you can’t capture them. This is how I think AI music should work—or it shou...

  Last piece of music for 2022 with an upbeat mood and a riff on time, and 45 (47) seconds in length. In fact, it doesn't need to be any longer.  I did three bass parts:   Jazz Bass:  https://youtube.com/shorts/XilKxY8QXAc?feature=share Fretless:  https://youtube.com/shorts/-2bD0zlwwZw?feature=share MM:  https://youtube.com/shorts/7uLipaM0Ta0?feature=share Very often I'll "re-purpose" my aphorisms by using them for song lyrics if they sound musical. ("Aphoristic Pop").

9/20/2005                     On the advent of cell phone video: Is it a new medium? How does it affect perception?  [Musing On Music Mostly LLM: Prompt: " Discuss the evolution of film and video and its effect on perception "]      9/20/2016             What all musicians should love is the process, both at compositional and performance levels. Sometimes I love the potential in ideas that I get, even if the first demos don’t fully express or resolve them. If all I get is a nice set of changes, I feel a sense of satisfaction and/or relief that the muse is still there.             9/20/2017             Orange Peel, 19 x 25 inches, acrylic on paper with iridescent copper patina. (Third in the ‘Leaf’ series (Goldleaf, Silverleaf). Copper patina makes the work bright and pastel in sunlight and darker and dramatic...

A piece generated from a few of my Dynaxioms on photography. 2006. Photos are confection for memory; You can't avoid being seduced by them. You want to forget, but the beautiful photo haunts you forever. If you lost a great city, you should destroy all the old photos as well. [Anything can be reconstructed from memory, and gives room for innovation that wouldn't have been there in the first version]. (9/12/2001) 0023. Sometimes history books (and films) say more about history than history itself. Recording history is like remembering a dream--with fragments stitched together into a narrative that develops a life of their own.   Sum 1: Nostalgia Galaxy by Lee Barry