Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

One of the first drafts of what might become Sum V: Curios , with pieces less than a minute long, each with an accompanying Short. Classical music for short attention spans--and no AI. Curio No. __ (9/12) by meta4s

9/30/1997             Roy Lichtenstein died. His use of ads, cartoons, etc. is similar to using samples in music. Music is really mimicking what happens in the art world, but with a long lag time.     9/30/1998             Surfed the Net on collaborative information filtering idea. Lots of great links: The Game of Life, the “Serendip” page. Must revisit.  [9/30/2024: This was the beginning of what we now know as simply an “algorithm”—the black box that defines the world we experience online, and now in life in general because it is recommending our relationships and how we navigate them. It has not been good for society or democracy because it is about collectivism as opposed to community. Viktor Frankl: “Only the community can ensure the meaning of individuality for the individuals…only the safeguarding of individuality for the individuals can ensure the meaning of community. This is what distingu...

9/29/2024                         If music is too much about emotion, it will never go in a different direction. It’s too hard to reinvent.     ***             Watched some footage from the David Gilmour Luck and Strange tour, specifically Great Gig In the Sky, where in place of the vocal improv by Clare Tory, they had a female vocal ensemble based on it–essentially a “scored” piece. It’s interesting that something spontaneous can later be arranged and played as if it was through-composed. This has happened to me many times where I’ll be playing something in a track as an improvisation and then later go back and actually score it for strings, even if it’s something musical in a field recording. Similar riffs happen in culture as well, where you take some cultural or historical element and spin it into something else that takes on secondary meanings... [9/29/2025. There was ...

9/28/2010  One thing instrumentalists understand is touch and feeling. [ Musing on Music LLM : “Discuss tactility in music”]     9/28/2019 Primary creative “access points” can sometimes lead toward more shallow depths of superficial interest, with no continued exploration of the ideas. Ideally what you should want is to follow through the various waypoints, even if how you began was clumsy or naive.  Creativity can have these kinds of “desire paths” but you have to have the desire to make them, or else you’re going around in the same circles thinking the scenery is somehow different, or that where you’ve come to a dead end.             There are departures but never complete arrivals in creativity.             [9/28/2024: Even though it’s a rare experience, I love it when the final result resembles the initial stages and access points. I’m reminded of Stephen Sondheim, who certainly didn’t fol...

9/27/2018             I’ve kept an idea list for as long as I can remember. The funny thing is that I tend to work on things that are in-progress or are a part of a series, which may or may not have been from the list. While I’m working, I will take the time to explore ideas as they arise, which get added to the list.     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 compa...

    This is kind of a silly thing based on an auction barker, an isometric rhythm where a lyric schema can be mapped over it. Each word in brackets can be swapped out with any word one through ten, omitting seven because it has two syllables and is not isometric. Perhaps an algorithm could be written that would do this in an LLM: [One] dollar bid now [two] now [two] will you give me [two] [Two] dollar bid now [three] now [three] will you give me [three] [Three] dollar bid now [four] now [four] will you give me [four] [Four] dollar bid now [five] now [five] will you give me [five] [Five] dollar bid now [six] now [six] will you give me [six] [Eight] dollar bid now [nine] now [nine] will you give me [nine] [Nine] dollar bid now [ten] now [ten] will you give me [ten] Possible Groove: Barker by meta4s Some Silly AI Versions:

9/25/1999             On the future of music listening: Now that we have the capability to compile songs and make our own collections, we need to weed out all this similar-sounding material: “Techno with samples of monks—already have one of those”. This will put the onus on the composers to come up with new and exciting material that will stand the test of time.             [9/25/2024: I realized at popular tourist locations millions (or perhaps billions) of people take pictures of the same things, and I had the idea for a camera app that would automatically delete photos that had already been taken, or would apply an effect of some kind to make them different. This is probably very easy now with AI. But the current data sets are full of cliches and they would all be removed if you made the instruction to do so.] [9/25/2025: If you generate a song with your words, then replace the words, and use those words to re-gene...

9/24/1999             Prediction: by 2020, the pop music world will experience a Singularity. If one uses the rule that cultural revolutions occur every 20 years, in 2020 will be using all recycled music. There will be no innovation, just digital remnants. Very few people will want to play an instrument.             [9/24/2024: A pretty good prediction @25. By 2049 there will be things we’re doing now that people will no longer be doing]. [9/24/2025: Those “digital remnants” are the training sets that AI music uses].  9/24/2005 Watched Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan. Things I liked: he talked about the “sound” and how it compelled him to pursue music, “the sound” meaning the intrinsic, 4th dimension qualities; A musical “expedition”; an artist has to be careful to never arrive at a place where he thinks he’s somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming... 9/24/2017...

 

Interesting: When I passed the Potbelly on Lake, one of the tables had an array of Hispanic theological and religious paperbacks (as a revival of “The Book Table”?) The one I’d be interested in is The Secret Holy War of Santiago de Chile, apparently published in 1989 just when Chile was in recovery from the coup. What caught my eye was that someone decided to display these in Oak Park, the gesture of it, as a “wink” of what is happening in the US.