Lee Barry's Blog

On Creative Experimentation

 Yesterday I was listening to an interview with Mark Hollis taken in 1998 where he was mostly talking about his creative process. In all the subsequent albums after his pop success, he was experimenting with different processes in the studio. What I’ve found in practice is that those kinds of experiments don’t always work out for the audience; audiences of pop music want to hear songs that

Esperanto AI

What better thing to do with old lyrics than to do un-singable versions of them in an obscure constructed language as blues/country songs? As fun as it was, it's still not real. There's no singer who's going to perform in Esperanto. No one speaks in Esperanto, let alone easily sings it.Other thoughts in retrospect: I find the translations to be clumsy and excessively wordy.  "

Conditions For Making Art

 Ideally, there shouldn't be any conditions for making art.Having conditions can also be seen as making excuses. In music, I never make an excuse: I just come up with ideas and I pursue them to see if they are viable. I don't say to myself, "Well, if somebody will listen to what I'm doing then I'll make more music." Ironically, I seem to be saying to myself, "If somebody bought my artwork

Why Do We Stop? (Cont.)

As we progress through life, we drop things that we used to do, even though we might not fully know why we stopped doing them, even though we might have liked doing them. Recently, I read a book about the avant-garde, How To Be Avant-Garde, particularly a passage about Marcel Duchamp. The author was curious why he stopped making art. Essentially, it was a shift to “conceptual

AI Artomat

 I don’t like the idea that creativity has to be convenient—they are two terms that don’t go together. We want things in a creative environment to perhaps be a little bit easier to do, but that’s what tools do: If you have a tool that is well-designed and doesn’t hurt your hand when you use it then that’s an element of design. In many ways, music has to be “designed”.The more we do something

Owning Words

 What AI music lacks is a producer. When you generate music with AI, you don’t have a say in the production, and you just have to accept the sound of it. As I’ve said before, AI music generation is basically a listener activity, like listening to the radio or a playlist, where certain tracks come up–and you like them and you won’t skip over them. But in all the music that I’ve generated, if

Numbed Down

 I realized that when I play instruments I’m getting tactile feedback–something you don't experience when you're generating music with AI. And every instrument feels different–it’s heavier or it’s lighter, larger or smaller, and you immediately adapt and interact with it. When we're just tweaking software we're not using the same parts of our brains. With AI, we tweak it like we would a

Creative Circumnavigation

 Today is the first anniversary of my restarting my paper diary, which I had kept from 1997 to 2008. but the new diary is a music diary, where every day I notate some kind of a riff or seed of an idea that I could develop in the future. It's interesting to loop back and revisit those ideas every day, some of which have been fully developed, some of which I never touched. I think it's an

Word Worlds

 Many of the lyrics in their oblique allusions and way-out metaphors are beginning to sound like real poems.---Leonard Bernstein, Inside Pop, 1966In Bill Maher's recent interview with Billy Joel, he groused about how some Beatles lyrics didn't make sense.  But they're more about the sound or their percussive value rather than telling a story. These days, it seems everything has to make

AI and Lyric-Writing

 When I generate AI music from lyrics, they are usually in a provisional state throughout the process. There was a lyric I was working on recently that contained a factual error, which I caught later on. At that point, the music was where I wanted it to be, but the error was the fly in the ointment. The question becomes, do you keep it as-is and include a "footnote" about the error and