Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

Ice Core Layers 2010 was the first year that I got my first pair of ear mics and a portable recorder. What I was most interested in was finding places that had embedded Keynotes or Soundmarks (continuous pitched elements in a place) which I wanted to integrate into my ambient music. Field recordings are actually a great way to listen to the environment because the recording apparatus has done some of that listening for you: when you come back and listen to the recording, you hear things that you missed when you were there. It works the same way in photography, where you come back home and look at the images and you see other things that were outside the frame that you didn't notice when you were attempting to get the shot. Even before I was doing field recording myself, I was interested in using field recordings made by others. I had a friend that visited various parts of the globe, one of them Costa Rica. I had taken his field recordings and made an immersive sound environment to ...

  A one-hour sound walk with binaural mics, Oak Park Wright District, Hemingway District, WWI Memorial, Lake Street, Marion Street, Pleasant Home, Holly Court. [Wear headphones]    

 Based on a field recording (Smartphone audio) on 11/4/2023  ***

10/12/2004             Article in paper about Salvador Dali’s 7 secrets for creative success : blow your own horn; keep up with current events; collaborate with the best; make new friends; expand your horizons; don’t just do one thing; dream big; believe in yourself.              [10/12/2024: I can’t imagine what Dali, or any surrealist artists would be doing in the 21st century, He wouldn’t be doing just one thing.] 10/12/2005             Apple releases the video iPod, of course with U2 in the promo spots. Now with the advent of mobile video, movie studios should offer individual chapters or scenes from movies. This is interesting because it also wags the dog, whereby individual scenes can be pre-released as an enticement to see the movie.             [10/12/2024: I still use the idea of the “Video 45”, although YouTube has recently increased the l...

10/11/2011             Weather continued summery.             Protests continue at LaSalle and Jackson. The energy here is amazing at both ends of the spectrum, with people looking downtrodden or completely electric. There’s a very loud drum circle grooving away, with car horns providing melody. [ Listen to a field recording taken simultaneously ]       Transcribed drums:   10/11/2015             It was the MP3 file that killed music. It reduced music to a shareable file, first through emails, then on the Internet. It made music “good enough” as a freebie, disincentivized it, and placed too much value on recording technology. Music was once a wonder of the world.              The thing that killed music wasn’t equal temperament. It was the recording. But who knew in 1970 that this would happen? Technology is weird in that it give...

8/26/2022 Tools are the most basic form of technology, but tools can very often be confused with creativity or obfuscate creativity. The greater the specificity of the genre, the more creativity will be at the service of technology. Certain genres of music have equipment requirements, but in my view, the creativity should be less tool-dependent—unless you start with a particular tool and find materials to use it on.     [8/26/2025: If AI is a tool, it's one that requires no physical effort--it's "motorized"]. 8/26/2023 Thousands of Americans on Saturday commemorated the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, a pivotal event in the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement at which Martin Luther King Jr gave his galvanizing “I have a dream” speech. A sonic memory: Audio Snapshots: Washington DC August 26, 1963 60 years on. 8/26/2026 Everyone ultimately becomes the product of memory, and will shape your intentions. I remember the things I liked in the 70s-90s and want...

8/24/1998 Article by drummer who does jungle grooves. It’s interesting how a new way of working creates new ways of thinking about music—such that new composers want to learn cutting-edge techniques, much in the same way composers in the 17th century wanted to learn about harmony, melody, and counterpoint using the equal-tempered tuning. And the new cut-and-paste techniques are really no less intricate. [8/24/2025. AI is certainly a new way of working. All artists are presented with a new world of creativity. In music, some may have never used any kind of electronic gear or a computer to make music. In 1998, any music magazine was all about gear and using computers. In my view, purity doesn’t go very far as a strategy in itself in terms of creativity being a generative phenomenon. Imagine still recording on a cassette recorder from the 1970s]. “Apathy is probably never good. I think it’s important to go back and see what was important to other generations, but more importantly, your ge...

8/15/1997 The first thing God created was the journey, then he created doubt and nostalgia.                           The AI Treatment:   Black-out poetry/lyric: 8/15/2010                 Field recording : Presidential Park, Oak Park, Illinois. 8/15/2024            When you generate lots of ideas, they are all stylistically different (as they did in the 1960s with auto design), so a cohesive production vibe is difficult. I have resorted to making short demos (as video shorts), that eventually can converge into an album. Initial choices are too difficult to uphold as a strategy when you’re in the middle of making tactical moves. It might have been easier in back in the 2000s. In 2024 the sentiment is that you should be following your joy and if it isn’t a joyous activity you should just drop it, I’ve never agreed with that. It’s just lazy. ...

The other side of the year  7/22/2005            “Meaning is the new money”.                           7/22/2010 Field audio: Farmer’s Market . 

Antipode: January 4ths  7/4/1886 Thomas Sullivan Diary (AI-Generated) Black-out lyric:                   7/4/1969 (Beatles Studio Diary)             Overdub onto the newly reduced Golden Slumbers and use of found recordings from the BBC Radio 2 broadcast of Britons and Jones winning The Wimbledon Ladies Tennis Championship beating Billie Jean King in a 71-minute three set.    7/4/1998 Interesting that Springsteen’s Born In The USA was misconstrued by most (including Lee Iacocca and Ronald Reagan) as some type of patriotic anthem, which it wasn’t, but sounded that way. The lessons here are: 1) if you write a song that sounds like an anthem, that’s how it will be perceived, regardless of what the lyrics say, and 2) most people don’t listen to the lyrics anyway. [7/4/2025: I still think this is mostly true. The sound washes over you first–tone and image are everything in pop music. But with AI,...

7/4/2020 A binaural field recording of this year's fireworks, decidedly more intense than previous years. Listen with headphones or earbuds low enough to mix in your local sounds. Note the isobel levels (areas of equal sound intensity): Background distant continuous "thunder", a "cloud" of sound delays/echoes that sometimes commingles with wind noise Middle ground within 50 feet where fireworks exploding  Foreground: traffic noise, voices, foot steps, air conditioners

The other side of the year   7/3/1930 (Edward Weston Diary) Morning walk near Point Lobos with Becking. “The scientist and the artist coming together for the avowed purpose of getting each other’s viewpoint, on mutually exciting ground.”    Songday Seed:         How AI interprets it:            7/3/1999 WXRT Flashback to 1967. I love listening to this stuff, not so much that I enjoy the music itself, but rather, thinking about that particular time and what led people to write and record the way they did. Zawinul’s Mercy Mercy, Mercy (the live Recording): I wonder if the crowd noise was coached or added later like a laugh track. What was going on on the stage that the audience would react that way? (Idea: Add another layer on top of recorded tracks, such as live audience sounds, as a way to put the music in a different context). Hendrix’s Foxy Lady: Hard-panning The vocals, tracks left “dirty”mics left on—lots of bleed....

December 17ths  6/17/2010             Harbor Walk : Continued walk past DuSable Harbor towards the Abegweit. There was a blues band playing on deck which you can hear in the background. A passerby says ‘Party Boat!’. The strong breezes make for very clanky boat masts. As I walked south along the curved shore along came several hundred joggers running past me. Continued path past yacht club and into Monroe Harbor area, traffic noise from LSD on right, end at Balbo Drive.  6/17/2024  When you look for synchronicities and don’t see them, they are happening to someone else which may involve you in the future.  *** If AI-generation is a toy, or a toy tool, and we can get accessories or different materials to use—for example different kinds of clay or putty with different attachments or extensions—it would produce very little variety. Anyone can make art with some crap ordered online. That’s what AI music is to me. I make prototypes with ...

  6/14/1886 I witness history disguised as necessity. The war taught us that democracy survives through decisive action. But whose decisions? Whose survival?  6/14/2005 While on a walk, there were two locomotives idling, their pneumatic system spitting out an insanely fast jungle rhythm in 64th notes, with little bursts of odd moments. (incorporate into music).  [Not exactly the same but a field recording of a passing train that could be used for atmosphere]: 6/14/2021 On “emotional piquancy” in music: Emotion is an emergent or flocking phenomenon. In music, there’s a flocking that happens when the dynamic level rises. If just one instrument got louder then it would throw off the piece. It’s the thinking together that really creates the emotion. When the composer is writing the piece it’s a mechanical process because you have to write in the dynamic levels to say how the piece should be emotional. In my experience working at that granular mechanical level is removed from ...

Antipode: December 9ths 6/9/2010 Field Audio: Union Station, Riverside at Adams                         6/9/2014 Composed a “placey” kind of piece—partly cloudy, then mostly sunny. The changing light in a place can affect the sound in an abstract way, similar to Debussy’s “Nuages”.  [6/9/2024—10 years after: I transformed the piece to include field recordings of train stations then used it as the soundtrack for a montage for a music video, “Arrival of Trains”. The narrative emerges from an artificial context of a woman on a train postwar (1948) and having memories of it.]  [6/9/2025: Play the two together --video and this repeating orchestral loop].   6/9/2019 Slippage --Jasper Johns in the wild:                  6/9/2023 Writers tend to think it’s easy to write lyrics. Lyrics have to be singable by someone. Even if you can sing it yourself with some ability (a...

3/9/1999 Watched documentary on Roy Orbison. He had one of the most unique voices in pop music. His falsetto sounded like a totally different character. The shots of the audiences in the 1960s were amusing: they all sat there like they were watching a film and weren’t sure how they should react. They all looked politely bored. Stanza of poem by A. Pushkin, quoted in Luria’s book. (I think it works as a song lyric): Small Wonder, is it? Kharita Will conquer decrepitude with a smile Driven to a frenzy of desire The Metropolitan will go wild [3/9/2025: Ended up on Frontiers ] 3/9/2012 The civil defense sirens went off this morning and I managed to record them. They are eerily beautiful. The best way to know a thing is in the context of another discipline.--Leonard Bernstein (From his Music Phonology lecture): 3/9/2022 I’ve come to the realization that while I have the desire to make art, the effort required doesn’t always have a satisfying payoff. All I would do is take a photograph ...

11/6/2000 Show on TV about town in Japan where its residents often live to be 100 years old, and they can't quite figure out why. This shows that context is so important—that a certain constellation of factors creates a particular outcome. Sometimes you don't really know which star in the constellation is the dominant one. 11/6/2010 To Navy Pier for SOFA show. Photos, low-angle November sun setting:                    Photographs For Music: Departure . Music: The Scandal (Music For Places IV).  11/6/2020 The idea of using AI for production (side-stepping human creativity) still makes no sense to me. Multi-track recording, and to some extent MIDI, are fully-matured tools that can be refined by extension. AI has a long way to go to get to that level. Andy Clark touched on this in the (somewhat wonkish) book Surfing Uncertainty. [11/6/2025: What a difference 5 years makes, but people who started using it 3 years ago see it as the only ...

11/5/1997             The artist of the future should develop the ability to see things from all angles and all disciplines. We should write music from an architectural standpoint, or design structures based on music or sound. Art should be a synesthetic experience rather than one-dimensional, “unisensorial” or from a purely literal perspective. Not only does a musician need to play in-tune and in-time, but be of the times.             [11/5/2024: Quincy Jones certainly was of the times in the time of his prime. He was already into rap in the mid-70s, using it in context with African drumming and chanting]. LLM : “Discuss interdisciplinary approaches to creativity”  11/5/1999 New Gehry bandshell design unveiled for Millennium Park. Clearly an example of “go to an extreme and retreat to a more useful position.”  11/5/2000               Artist Marcos Raya: “My head is fu...

 Soundwalk to Thatcher Woods, peak fall color.

8/28/1963  Field recording: March on Washington. (Audio Snapshot)   8/28/1999 My approach to music: Design a system that allows you to express ideas, rather than using a configured system and thinking of ideas based on prepackaged concepts. (Exploration rather than a guided tour).              [8/28/2024: 20 years later–the Songday system. I love working this way].    8/28/2002  Story idea: Set in Anytown, USA, where every character is a cliche (the old woman, the barber, the criminal, the crooked politician, the idiot savant), but we find out at the end of the film that the people are not ordinary at all. Possible title: “Everyone’s Got One”.                  8/28/2004 Baptismal: 8/28/2008 Obama is nominated at Dem convention and gives historic speech in Denver. His “Big Night” 4 years in the making, and 45 years after King’s “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Mem...