Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

 AI-generated based on a 2011 song conceived in an open G Minor tuning. All minor chords.  Score:

  Ralph Meatyard - Untitled (1964)     AI treatment: 

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.

  3/30/2006   *** Sometimes my Chicago blues roots show in my music. I was a huge blues fan when I first started playing in the late 70s. The annual Blues Fest was a major event.  You can't deny Blues is where it all started in the 60s. With AI music anyone can use "Rock" and "Blues" in a prompt, but it might not resonate if you've never played blues. I still think that humans do blues better, but this is not bad.  Also, Cal's was what was left of Chicago's red-light district, bounded by and Wells at the west, State at the east, and Van Buren at the north, and Congress at the south.  3/30/2011 Even after 20 years of riding the El through the west side to the Loop, I’m still seeing new things. Today it was “New Drift Liquors” in Austiin-- a shuttered saloon. Would be a great photo.  [This actually was a photo I took of Cal’s at Wabash and Van Buren, now a Greek fast-food restaurant. There's a little window on the north side of the building where t...

3/12/2014 The sonic landscape of a city has its own ecology of “organisms”: the screeching sounds of metal against metal, background hum from power lines, buzzing neon, passing elevated trains, pneumatic machinery—the natural sounds of a city landscape that becomes a quotidian experience, yet unobtrusive and perhaps has a calming effect. (This was mixed to not interfere with the top layer of attention). Used for Photographs For Music : 

Was looking at photos of Loomis Dean, a LIFE photographer in the 50s and this photo caught my eye as to go with this experimental track, done with a Juno 106, MT-32 module and MC-300 Sequencer, using a pre-existing MIDI file mapped randomly. 

   Church, Southeastern U.S., 1936 -- Walker Evans Very often we forget who we were. In the process of understanding the present moment, we lose a sense of our deep history. Should we change, and what for? To what degree does that affect the roots of our own life? If you lose your roots, there’s no way to get nutrients from the soil of life. (12/11/2003)  Seed:   Curio No. 6 by meta4s

9/29/2025 There was a nice happy accident at the end of a video I was editing that looped the phrase "Catch you on the next deep dive". A Photographs For Music video using Urban Biota and a Gregory Crewdson photograph 

On the other side of the year 9/21/1998 Reading Umberto Eco essay on analysis of the cult status of Casablanca. He said the movie was an aggregation of lots of different elements—a movie made of other movies.             [This is intertextuality–what LLMs now are. If we used LLMs exclusively, everything would be derived from something else, not arising from ideas that humans have. But even then, many ideas have already been thought of. Google resolved that 25 years ago, where you could look up something to see if it had already been done.]               9/21/2009 Went to performance of Turkish military ensemble at Millennium Park. I don’t know why but I have an affinity for Turkish folk song and Taqsim—almost a form of jazz riffing, but at the same time ritualistic and devotional. On Van Buren at Wells, there’s this seedy tavern (Cal’s), and in one of the windows they made this strange “shrine” with a broken gui...

9/4/2012 Milwaukee for MAM visit. Excellent collection of modern art: Judds, Morris Louis’s, Kelly’s...      9/4/2016 On dealing with monotony in music: Monotony is largely subjective based upon cultural factors. I like constraints. With spare and/or repetitive bass parts I like to experiment with duration, space, and range, to the extent that the music allows it. Tension can be created by switching octaves; leaving space and playing with notes and rest durations can push and pull the groove in interesting ways. Alternating the role of player and listener, as well as little rhythmic adjustments can be effective.  [On Bass Lines] 9/4/2017 People are still asking if 4’33” is music. If you broaden the definition of music to include a range of sound that includes pitch as well as noise, then it can be music if you are mindful of the sounds around you. Each “performance” is different because the ambient sounds are different. I’ve understood it as being equal parts co...

  Artificial intelligence is obviously more capable of evoking emotions than it was only a year ago. With this song, it's typically a cut-up of various diary entries, in this case, April 28ths. It also references a passage from W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn , where he mentions sunken willows. The original title was Through Brundall on to Cantley , but the sunken willows image captured the mood perfectly. I also think that it's a nice combination of poetry and lyric, where they can kind of function the same way, with fragments of images, such as the fragmented nature of dream imagery. It's what's termed as “Sebaldian”--having to do with Sebald’s dreamy prose. The photography is also interesting, and was taken in the mid to late 19th century in the same area as the path that was taken in Rings of Saturn through towns in East Anglia (Cantley). The playlist also includes an ambient mix, which takes just the vocal set against various field recordings of wind and waves.  ...

A late-60s "period" piece generated by AI. It's amazing how including an organ in a prompt results in this. The part is too rudimentary to be Keith Emerson or Jon Lord. The photo is a self-portrait by Lee Friedlander, probably late 60's so it goes right with it.    In the out-takes, the first track immediately reminded me of early Yes with Tony Kaye on keyboards and Peter Banks om guitar, and before Jon Anderson joined.   ***  It’s only later in your life when you have access to both the side streets and the highways in your life. If you were born in the 1960s and an adolescent in the 70s, those are the side streets of your life. Then there’s the highway of the 1960s.             I didn’t access the highway of the 1960s until the late 1970s, at which time I was “on the road” with the other generations that have been on those roads for a long time, including the highway of the 1950s and 1940s. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that I act...

2/5/2005 The Eno album I’ve always liked is On Land , but I also like his pop material, e.g. Before and After Science . Like Cage, he melded the philosophical and conceptual with music. What I used later on was the idea of “avoiding” music, but ultimately I became a “born again” musician. I suppose I just like playing. But the way I write and record was heavily influenced by Eno. This is what Eno would have said about Cage.  Interesting: Black MIDI is a way to use something for it wasn’t originally intended for special effects. The main purpose is to introduce extreme ideas as brute force to heave oneself out of ruts. (Go to an extreme and retreat to a more useful position). It’s also another form of slippage—using the punched hole as the printer dot.          2/5/2011 Prediction: By 2016, the Internet of Things will have grown exponentially and will pervade social media. Text messaging will become automatic and will obviate the need to type into a mobile ...

 Music generated by AI  using a short cryptic poem I had written, as a "score" for a Sebald photograph (Benacre Broad?) taken around the time of Rings of Saturn , and has a the typical "Sebaldian" saturnine quality, then arranged for string quartet on a lark as a "shortet", a minute in length. String Shortet No. __ ("Vintage of the Vinyl") by meta4s

8/3/2010 Dappled garden (Art Institute south garden)       8/3/2011 New lap steel.                                       A blues/country/work song idea using a lap steel in open G minor. The "language" motif:  The Short: Footage is from John Ford's 3 Bad Men .     8/3/2022 Quartet for “1966”.   Decade Highways It’s only later in your life when you have access to both the side streets and the highways in your life. If you were born in the 1960s and an adolescent in the 70s, those are the side streets of your life. Then there’s the highway of the 1960s. I didn’t access the highway of the 1960s until the late 1970s, at which time I was “on the road” with the other generations that have been on those roads for a long time, including the highway of the 1950s and 1940s. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that I actually started to be influenced by the 1960...