Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

5/1/1987 On Kawara -May 1, 1987, 1987, Liquitex on canvas, 61 × 89 in                     5/1/1992 The Inner King The eroded plain of this traveled land Hides footprints of men Blown by wind driven sand Sunshine in my heart of light Without your love The emptiness encumbers the night Torn between the forces that surround me And the king that rules within May he serve forever fighting The wars I need to win  Run through AI. It's sometimes clever how it add treatments to voices, and this one works well as an overlapping loop of verse and chorus where you can have two voices alternating them. I had never thought of doing that.  . The orchestral arrangement (a string quartet and woodwind quintet, plus pizz bass)  The original scribble. What's better about writing manually is that you're not boxed in by software limitations, as if it was a vending machine. No one's diet could come from vending machines alone. You'd be ...

4/6/1966 (Beatles Studio Diary)  “The first session for what was to become the significant album Revolver . Here was a set of recordings destined to rock the rock world, and change the course of popular music. And its momentous closing song ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was the first to be taped. What a start!...” 4/6/1999 Story on radio about rock concert in Serbia where they were protesting against NATO, asking for peace. No one protested against Milosevic, because if they did they would be dead. I thought rock ‘n’ roll was anti-oppression?  Listened to interview with Mary Schmich, the Tribune columnist, whose graduation speech column was used as a lyric for a techno groove. I like the idea that anything can be used as a lyric. Obviously someone is using the old Lennon technique of getting ideas from a newspaper. [4/6/2025: And I’m still at it…] 4/6/2016 Another 80s watershed: Sting’s Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985), the other “Revolution in the Head”, from poppy Police to sullen...

4/4/2024 Score for Tableau Vivant   *** 4/4/2022             Algorithms now define the trends. Spotify artists and YouTubers tend to abide by them by producing content that trends, which creates a feedback loop favoring both the artist and platform at the expense of deeper creativity. Even though there are no longer duration constraints as there were in vinyl and tape, the constraints prevail because of shortened attention spans, now reduced to a few seconds—which incidentally machines can use to see trends. Alas, it’s unlikely that we’ll sit through a whole side of an LP. (There’s a tenuous correlation between what algorithms define as being popular and what people actually find interesting. Popularity has become more of a false positive by manipulating the data to show that false positive).  4/4/2026 Ai music is ordering some grub at the counter and playing a few songs on the jukebox while you wait. 

3/18/2022 Lyric/Poem idea:  The things that she said She didn't even know She was talkin' on a talk show The places she went She didn't even go She was talkin' on a talk show Used for an AI-generated song.  3/18/2023 3/18/2026 In music, I've never really forced myself into one genre, and I like to do a lot of things at the same time. So nothing is stopping me from writing classical music with some pop music in the background. If I'm just putting in articulations or bowings, I could be listening to something else. Since the advent of the internet and especially social media, there's always the possibility of context collapse--that we have different audiences we have to play to. There's the classical audience that doesn't want to hear any pop music, and then there's the pop music audience that isn't interested in classical music. But I'm interested in both. It's now even more complicated with AI because I can easily write songs in ...

3/8/2002 It was the advent of FM radio that made a big impact on how music developed in the late 60s and 70s. 3/8/2010 Show on the death of radio: I too “heard it on the X”—Chicago’s XRT. That was the station I listened to when I picked up my first guitar. It was an auspicious beginning of my music education and vestiges of it remain in my work. But nostalgia aside, I will not miss broadcast radio. XRT is now just a shell of its former self, consisting of a mostly relentless and torturous barrage of screaming commercials. I now time-shift almost all my media with podcasts, which I can re-listen to at any time, and it still sounds like broadcast radio. The profit model in this approach is that people like me are willing to pay for this service, as a return to radio in its current state is unthinkable. [3/8/2025: The early days of podcasting, like the early days of anything, were its best in some ways. But as we see with everything these days, particularly YouTube, it’s so infested with ...

3/7/2002 Computers take the spirituality out of work.  [Dynaxiom 3460: Something AI might never have: 'signature'--as in 'signature style'. Anything generated by AI is essentially 'de-signed'. If AI had the capability for 'handwriting' could it write its signature without front-loading it with data? AI can certainly have a 'style', but it is dependent on patterns in the data. If you had an LLM that was just the guitar tracks played by one person, there would be a style, but you couldn't ask it questions about how the style evolved. You'd have to include interviews with that guitarist, and the responses would have nothing to do with playing the guitar; It would be only the patterns in the text. The guitar player and the guitar stems in he LLM are not intimately connected. It is one hand clapping (tapping)]. 3/7/2005 Photographer Diane Arbus has a show at the Met. She let people politely "gawk" at freaks, dwarves, and sideshow per...

Diary Antipode: July 12ths 1/12/2003             Interesting: Theater and film metaphors applied to “war”. The military often references a battle zone as a “theater”, and now with the impending war with Iraq, the U.S. has constructed “ movie sets” where they can practice mock warfare. (“Stage”, “arena” are other metaphors—or as a performance, or “surgical strike”—medical, although medicine I think used the “war”metaphor (“metawar”). [1/12/2026: TV changed the political landscape during Bush 43. The Vietnam war was the first TV war, but 24/7 cable news didn’t exist then. In the 90s the “shout shows” emerged, like Jerry Springer]. Excerpt Library (Sociology) : “Discuss the effect of TV on politics" 1/12/2005 Extinct sounds: a slammed phone, rotary dial sound, pop-up flash bulbs, gurgle of coffee percolators, projector clatter, typewriters, airplane propellers, car door slams from the 1960s, which were more metallic, rather than rubberized. Sounds are lik...

Early AI Slop (2023)   In the spirit of the diary remix idea, I ran an experiment where I used just the entries from March 4ths, created a lyric, and then created some music for it.  I randomly selected words and phrases until I had a verse idea, then formulated a query in ChatGPT to flesh it out--most of which was cliche junk. For associated images, I used an AI image generator with various queries drawn from the 3/4 text, e.g. "Anne Frank and Martha Stewart in 2046" and Frank Gehry buildings on Mars" which generated some interesting and funny images, which could be used as an album cover. But for the most part, it felt like a waste of time. Anything that involves sorting through infinite permutations feels inundating. Some of the images are creepy and scary. I'm not looking for creepy and scary. What I'm interested in are things on the periphery of the uncanny valley, where it's slightly skewed in compelling ways. That's difficult to find when you have ...

2/28/1976 From: "Bowie: Now I'm A Businessman" "...This time - boosted by the success of his Fame single all the attention he has received in the past four years - Bowie played the 14,000 seat Cow Palace (the city's largest rock hall) and the response was phenomenal. Though his 90-minute set started slowly as Bowie concentrated on new material, he worked up such an enthusiasm in the arena with his versions of such early, well-known works as Changes, Rebel Rebel and Jean Genie that a rare thing happened after the first, rather obligatory encore."        2/28/1999  There’s an invisible line between life and art.   2/28/2000 Interview on NPR with Bob Moog. He said that even though he spent most of his life in electronic music, it still feels good to play the piano. We need a tactile connection with music. Clara Rockmore: She was the only theremin virtuoso. Very often there will be only one person who will fully utilize a new invention and it’s usually never t...

2/23/1944             (Diary of Anne Frank) “The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature’s beauty and simplicity. As long as this exists, and that should be forever, I know that there will be solace for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances. I firmly believe that nature can bring comfort to all who suffer. Oh, who knows, perhaps it won’t be long before I can share this overwhelming feeling of happiness with someone who feels the same as I do.” Black-out poetry:           For those who are frightened,  lonely or unhappy, go outside alone with the sky, nature and God.  for then and only then– can you feel nature’s beauty  as long as this exists (and that should be forever) know that there wil...

2/14/1998 Film: Ma Vie En Rose . Excellent art film by Belgian filmmaker about a boy who wants to be a girl and throws the entire neighborhood into disarray. Psychologist in film suggested that perhaps the parents' wish to have a girl influenced the outcome. As usual lots of crazy people riding the Subway on Saturday night. and it seemed as though everyone was an actor playing a role in a movie, such as the crazy trumpet player (Chet Baker) Nancy (Sid and Nancy), and a guy wearing a plaid shawl who looked like he’d be perfect for a film about immigrants, coming in through Ellis Island. 2/14/2023 Was reading This Is What It Sounds Like, a book by the former record producer for Prince, and she made an interesting point about liking something versus wanting something: You can like a piece of music but you could like it so much that you’d want to learn how to play and or write it. That was my situation back in the 1970s when I liked a lot of music, and then I wanted the records. Then...

2/11/1979             (Keith Haring Journal)             My interest in video is to explore the juxtaposition of words and images or sounds and images to formulate results that require the participation and individual interpretation of the viewer. My interest in painting is to explore the infinite variations of form and space relationships to produce objects and images that require the participation and individual interpretation of the viewer.                          [2/11/2025: We can probably trace this back to the rise of abstraction in painting in the early 20th century with Kazimir Malevich and other artists who created a paradigm shift away from representational art. The second sentence of Haring’s diary entry could have been made by David Lynch, an artist who fully explored the territory where painting and film overlap].   2/11/1998...

2/10/2002 On the boundary between free-form music and structured music: Music without limitations can be boring. It’s more exciting to work with constraints rather than to play with the net down. Free-form music can seem arrogant as it doesn’t invite the listener in or compel them to connect with it. The success of free music depends on its ability to connect at the “fourth dimension” (level of the conceptual), and the surface elements (how it sounds) are not as important. 2/10/2025 Making AI music as a listener as opposed to a writer or player allows you to make something and later realize that at least you made something based on your original thoughts and ideas. But it's still like a bag of trail mix out of a vending machine. You have to at least make the bag with an original design.  2/10/2026 Dynaxiom 1348. My definition of improvisation: taking set structures and using developed skills in rhythm, harmony, and melody to create organized sounds that comport with the set structu...

2/4/1998 Interesting interview in Computerlife with Brian Eno on the generative nature of future music where pieces are started from seed ideas and grow organically and evolve naturally, which mimics the way folk music resonates through culture. Computer programs also will have these types of characteristics whereby they are designed to develop and learn with experience, just as humans do. To me, generative music is useful in producing raw ideas from which to develop new pieces. This approach could also use the computer to solve the problems inherent in composition, for example, to design the form of the piece, dynamics, and so on. Eno also says that the most interesting connection is in the brain, so we don’t always have to associate images with sounds. He says we spend too much time syncing things together. He didn’t even compose cues when he wrote for film, he just uses existing music. And as in Hall’s observations, things can naturally synchronize regardless of whether they have an...

1/30/1969 (Beatles Studio Diary)   The 42-minute rooftop show, a lunchtime blast into the cold wind, imagine a high London rooftop in January. Little wonder Ringo borrowed wife Maureen’s red mac. John borrowed Yoko’s fur wrap—is preserved in its entirety onto 8-track audio tapes at EMI, engineered down below in the basement by Glyn Johns, sadly unable to be an eyewitness to the events... Up to the rooftop Rooftop show Little wonder Ringo Oh Yoko  *** AI version:   1/30/1999 Stopped at Snukst Music , a tiny shop on South Pulaski, with tens of thousands of instruments. Everything was just sort of stacked randomly in “forests” of basses, guitars, dobros, nothing on stands or racks. They said, “Everything is new”...including the Orange bass amp circa 1969.  1/30/2022  I’ve always thought the best way to write pop music is from the ground up from a beat, or even a ticking metronome, and scatting or rapping over the top of it in nonsense syllables as placeholder...

1/29/1999 Tower Records at noon and bought Mari Boine and Portishead live. Looking through the World section, I see so many discs that look Interesting: but it's so easy to get burned on these. Imports from Asia are interesting–their packaging is so much more alluring and inventive. Disappointed with the Portishead CD. What they do doesn't translate to the stage. The DJ scratch thing sounds forced and overdone, but it's the only thing that makes it sound 90s. When we listen to it in 20 years, we’ll be able to trace the history. [1/29/2025: A recent Album Years podcast on 1994 included Portishead. I liked the vibe and still revisit it sometimes. But ultimately, the vibe of a recording that relies only on the sound of recordings can’t easily be reproduced. This is the issue now with AI-generated music which sounds good as a recording but usually there’s not much actual music in it when you just play it manually or try to sing it with just a guitar]. 1/29/2008  The Death of M...

1/25/2006 Hamas wins majority in Palestinian elections. If you promote the idea of democracy, why is this such a surprise to the US?  In one day, the boundaries have all been reconfigured. Now you have turf , not regions or countries.     Excerpt Library (Science):   "Discuss political boundaries" 1/25/2012 On the creative process: what is the action chain of thinking? What results from sensory input?             Idea: An album of songs set in the next Awakening (Second Turning), circa 2045-2050. [Eventually became the 2046 album]. 1/25/2023 Words and phrases are always driving my musical ideas because the words can already have a music in them. At the primitive level, you should be able to write songs with just percussion and the voice. All the melody and harmony can be mapped over it. Lyrics to music is bottom-up and more improvisatory and music to lyrics is top-down and less spontaneous—although once...

1/24/1999             10-year-old boy writes essay about Clinton perjury. The irony will be that the kid grows up and does the same thing the president did. (It’s not perjury, it’s “creative lying”, “poetic untruths”). [1/24/2026: We think that presidents set an example, but rather it’s the culture at large that sets the example, perhaps through the Copycat Effect . "A survey of 18,000 Americans revealed significant political and generational divides, particularly concerning young voters. Regarding attitudes perceived by some as sexist, racist, homophobic, or violent, the study suggests these are not solely a result of Trump creating a permissive environment. Instead, generational trends are more significant. Notably, the belief that violence might sometimes be necessary in politics is strongly generational. Younger voters, particularly Gen Z, perceive the political system as not functioning well for them and are questioning its flaws and potential sol...

1/22/2002 Sent Secret Sphinx CD to Keith Hannaleck at muzikman.net [This was demo album I did in 1998, right at the beginning of DIY music, not yet fully on the internet, although MP3.com did exist at that point. I think I had burned about 5 copies of the CD. It was never a formal release. I like some of the songs on it. It had possibilities if done as a production. I played and sang everything as an elaborate demo.] 1/22/2017 Lots of 60s pop songs had “easy” bass lines that were “basically” chord roots and/or arpeggios. They were easy to play from a fingering standpoint but were harmonically interesting as well. After SNL’s tribute to Obama, To Sir With Love is a good example. I think Carol Kaye played on it. 1/22/2024 As I’ve been going through some of my notes, I had been working on songs over the course of sometimes three months, so a song would have started in February and then finished in May. It’s probably best that we use rule drift because you don’t want to get too locked in...