Lee Barry's Blog, page 11

Sonic Isolationism

 Music is “pleasurable” in its capacity to handle both consonance and dissonance in the traditional sense, as well as variations in timbre and texture. We all hear a tritone as being “dissonant” or in a state of suspension that will eventually “fall” into consonance. But that’s too simplistic: since the classical era, music has been redefined and extended in more “artificial” ways, such as

Evolution of Skill

 The shift from music being defined by classical or traditional approaches began to change in the 1950s (and perhaps a bit earlier), which introduced the possibilities of sound synthesis through electronics, which now has evolved into computers, the internet and AI. How we value music ultimately determines its evolution and what we view as a venerable “skill”.8/11/2016[8/11/2024: All new

Musical Combines

 Robert Rauschenberg, Short Circuit (Combine Painting), 1955 I once had an idea to make a portrait that was a bricolage of various print products that are available as digital printing options: wood, glass, aluminum, ceramic tiles, and title it OEM, as a reference to their generic manufactured quality. The equivalent in music would be to have each section in the song as one of these

Jazz AI

 Guitar solos are dead only to the degree that they exceed the attention span of the listener. If you look at the popularity of videos featuring soloing, the attention span is longer. But these days, I think it’s more about the power of getting Likes. The old-school version of soloing is probably dead and follows the decline of interest in jazz in general. Back in the day, people spent

Why AI?

 P-197 (1977) -- Manfred Mohr If you already have skills, why would you want to make AI-generated art?  This is an interesting idea to ponder. In the past, abandoning traditional craft was a way to make a clean break with the past--as John Baldassari did when he staged a "cremation" of his paintings, or when Robert Irwin nixed painting in favor of light and space art, or when

Hemispherics (Cont.)

 Everyone is capable of being a savant, but reasoning gets in the way. They also found that music somehow rewires the brain. The brain can be “rearranged” in lots of different ways. Music is different in that it has a transcendental quality (if you let it) which goes back to the problem in paradox of reason: music can develop the capability to reason, but in the process can make music too

Eurythmic AI

  In the Tin Pan and Brill Building era, very often ideas for songs came from title ideas and typically became the chorus.Tell It Like It Is is/was a popular song,  now recorded by 7 artists. It's emblazoned on (most of) our brains at this point. But imagine "tell it like it is" was a phrase that was simply in the flow of something you were reading or something someone said. What

Remembering Oliver Sacks

 Oliver Sacks really spoke for music’s humanistic qualities. It may be the beginning of a period where we leave behind our most deeply evolved understanding of music, and merge more with computer hardware and software. That’s nothing to get excited about, but that is apparently where we are heading. (Think ISIS destruction of antiquities.) Formal music education is almost non-existent at the

Pattern-Seekers

 Structural Constellation - Josef Albers (1955)Since we are pattern-seekers, music may make us more generally aware of patterns, just as visual art does. Music also may encode with other experiences and trigger memories associated with them, regardless of whether or not we like the music. To this day, there are pieces of music that evoke places and experiences that I’ve had in the past. I

Liberal Arts Education In The 22nd Century

 Russian State Scientific Center for Robotics and Technical Cybernetics ©Richard AndersonInteresting story idea: 100 years in the future young people want to go to college for a liberal arts degree, to study philosophy, art history, and so on. But at that time it would be difficult to construct a liberal arts education because it would have gone fallow. Five generations had passed and