Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

  Buncheong

    A string shortet based on an AI version of Hot New Earth . It's an interesting evolution: Original pop song>AI treatment>transcription>AI treatments. The string quartets have nothing to do with the original song but is its parentage. An AI versions of the AI version.  No. 1:   No. 2:

  It's interesting to re-imagine old lyrics with AI with fake band names. Feel free to use the names, but you'll have the same band playing different music, which might be interesting in the AI realm. [Hot New Earth 1997]  Visionary art  Culture create Useful technology  What cannot be made? Weaving the cloth That keeps us warm Leaving the land So trashed and worn The balance of soul To the roots in the land To the gothic cathedrals Where the masses band The song and the dance Of the social norm Is now the slam dunk Of the antisocial porn  In a hot new earth In a cold cold sweat Hot new earth Meets a cold cold death Force times velocity Will give us power In a hot new...  Earth Overrated human The master of slaves Never the spiritual Just material craves A culture to integrate The math with the art The choice (joy) to be ignorant And not to be smart The removal of skin The raising of the sea Take away the trees The means for recovery Poison pills For a feve...

 

 

  Based on the diary entry:   5/21/1997 Cold/windy, 50 It’s been such a cold spring that the birch trees don’t even have buds yet. Such a cold spring The birch trees are bare   Seed:     

 AI-Generated Photo    

 Reading Cones--Richard Serra  

 

  Alternately about continuous software "improvements" to justify its success (bells and whistles), or just saying things are going well when they aren't. The Special Hello version is my pick with its nice vocal melismas.   ***  Another whistle   Another bell   Another shoe   Another fell      Keeping secrets   Never tell   Always say   You're doing well      Another bell   Another ring   Another wish   Another dream      Keeping secrets   Never tell   Always say   You're doing well   

      The order in which we do things has also changed in that text can now generate both audio and video using AI. So it’s easier to start with text, so you don’t have to deal with sound and visuals later; the text automatically does that. But it’s the ideas (not from text) that are now missing from generated art, but you can add those later as well, just as you would add a narrative to a film that was all eye candy. It’s like making the architectural plans for a house you already built. The lyric is tangentially based on the Out of Order blog post, as well as the Oblique Strategy:   Do the last thing first Reverse *** Do the last thing First Reverse Do the last thing Do the first thing Last Reverse Do the first thing Do the last thing First Reverse Do the last thing Do the first thing Last Reverse Do the first thing Do the last thing (First) Reverse Do the last thing Do the first thing Last (Reverse) Do the first thing 

 Kinzie Street Bridge  

  Sometimes I like to interact with AI-generated music to see what's under the hood. AI music is the new radio that musicians play along with, but they are also generating the songs. I think it's a great way to learn music and start writing. This is a pop song I generated from my lyrics in an early-mid 70s pop style--a style I grew up with on AM radio, so this is somewhat of a nostalgia trip. It's like the late '70s when I would turn on the radio and play along. So I attempted to put my own bass part on it as I would on any track. The existing part was almost imperceptible. My approach to bass parts is always compositional in nature. You can't ride the root all the time, and you have to think about the overall shape of the lines, what range they are played in, and how it is a counterpoint with the other parts. For pop music like this, you don't want too much below the staff, keeping in the low range of a guitar, then changing octaves for contrast. The playing o...

 

5/7/2024 civil defense sirens: Pitches are E#, B D, F#  

  The original song, You Go To My Head, was written in 1938 and was covered many times over the decades. It's one of the most standard of Standards. A few years ago,  I watched a film based on the same title, about a woman who was involved in a rollover accident in the Moroccan desert, was concussed and got long-term amnesia. She was picked up by an architect who was working in Morocco building houses for people. He had also built a house for himself–a very minimal house–very Corbusian–just a white stucco structure, which I really liked. I had never seen a film that was shot in Morocco–totally gorgeous. The screenplay was almost stupid and characters wooden, but the cinematography was interesting, shot in Morocco with Guilhem Eustache's Fobe House as a set. All natural lighting. I saw lots of David Lynch influence.  What was particularly interesting as a corollary was that a person who had been concussed and has memory loss is sort of like an artificial intelligence or a...

This is a passage from the book The Story of Stories where I’m swapping our “story” for “song” as a corollary between stories and song lyrics. I don’t think lyrics have to tell stories, but rather suggest them. Even if the songwriter explains what it’s about, listeners will find different stories which might be triggered by words, lines, or couplets. I like them to be about something if possible, but music has a top-down control on what you can get away with in a lyric, and also how the singer sings it. A bunch of random lines that means nothing in themselves can work well with the right singer. With AI you can experiment with this. It’s much harder with human singers because of the differences in vocal apparatus.  *** And that raises a question: Is a song what is written or what is listened to? This is not a new concern. Literary theorist [Roland Barthes[, among many others; wondered about it. [Barthes] concluded a song is not what is written but what is listened to; so much so t...

  To me, using AI in music is essentially a very conceptual thing, and is an extension of conceptual art—not mainstream. Music itself is a conceptual art even if you’re not doing conceptual work.   I just read an article about the Endel and Plastikman collaboration. Basically what they’re doing are remixes but they’re running them through neural networks and using Alexa Skills, which is interesting. But I don’t see it as that innovative. It’s people trying to be innovative and they’re covering the same ground of people who are now their grandparents or great-grandparents. If you consider the threads of classical music, we’re sort of still doing that as well. It’s a way to be conceptual-cool as a musician. I did it too at age 35.   The problem I have with AI music is that it doesn’t really give you anything to do over longer periods. Once the Beatles were using the studio as an instrument their time in the studio increased. If all they ever did in the studio was let machin...

The rhythmic seed for this was something I heard on TV while watching the inauguration of the Pope last May. There was an interesting juxtaposition of bell ringing and a brass ensemble (Bb). It's polytonal with the low strings playing a 3-bar repeating phrase of E-naturals and B-naturals with oscillating G minor and E major triads.  For the video, somehow I was thinking of Ben Hur.It's ironic to squeeze a cinemascope aspect ratio into a Short. *** Curio No. 36 by meta4s