Lee Barry's Blog, page 12

Turnkey Music

 As I’ve been working with music AI over the past couple months I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to contextualize it with all the other things that I do. I realized this morning as I was working on something—and it wasn’t really catching my ear—is that it has to be recontextualized as something else. It might be a good way to make a new music avant-garde. If something doesn’t work

The Sound Of A Flood

 For World Listening Day 2024.A year ago Montpelier Vermont was hit with catastrophic flooding. What's particularly interesting about this footage is that it is full of keynotes and rhythms produced by the various alarms. All of them fit over a drone in A minor. This is a relatively new phenomenon--at least in terms of electronic alarms which have a strobing pattern:

What Painter Are You As A Musician?

 Klee's Bauhaus NotebookHow do you show up for creativity, and where are you on the spectrum of serious to playful, left-brained to right-brained? When I’m in divergent mode I'm in idea-collection mode and open to happy accidents. But at some point, you have to get started on making something, which will tilt you into left-brain mode. If I'm working in a score I'm almost all left-brain.

If Rock Is Dead

 A Songday for 7/13If rock is in fact ‘dead’, will it have a revival at some point in the future? Arguably, the quality of music in the traditional sense has been declining since the 60s, and yet music written in the two decades following, was still reverent of musical history, and directly influenced by it.Every 20 years or so you get generational effects, which determine how music history

Songwriting With Jen

 Years ago, I thought the Boomy app would be useful for generating song ideas, but they were too provisional to use out of the box. But songwriters can already generate ideas quickly--and perhaps too quickly, producing too many ideas. I generate them in myriad ways: titles, lines, couplets, alternate tunings, metaphors, strategies, or just noodling around on an instrument. Lately, I've

Timeless Versus Vintage

  What’s the difference between "timeless" and "vintage"? Something that is timeless has universal acceptance and is exalted to the highest level of human achievement over centuries and millennia, whereas "vintage" is hierarchically lower and is of shorter duration. But there are also "movements" which are typically shorter, but aren’t vintage, just as Dada, Neo-Dada and Pop Art aren’t

An AI Feature Request

If I were to construct a custom AI tool or algorithm it would simply be what I’m doing now: select words from a specific text (not the entire scraped internet) and map them to a rhythm, select a good key (including horn keys if I specify that it uses horns, or to automatically choose a jazz or R&B template--which means it will be a swing feel (but do computers do swing well?), choose a good

Music History In The Age of Streaming

 Chart from Reebee Garofalo's 1975 book, Rock 'n' Roll Is Here To Pay One of the objectives in Bob Stanley's book Let's Do It seems to be the parsing out a chronology of very old music from the early 20th century, e.g. the ragtime music that was released as 78s. It's really an issue these days because you can't suss out a good chronology when you're on streaming services--for example,

Idea To Product

  The essence of creativity might be a winnowing process from idea to product: determining when a product isn't needed, when prototypes don't need to be made, and so on. It is the primary essence of creativity to have the ideas be the product. Marcel Duchamp had it right back in the 1910s, whereby one can have the idea of making a readymade from an ordinary utilitarian object, or to

Vintage Phases

 When I think about AI now in comparison to music technologies in the mid and late 80s, I see it as being provisional and experimental, and interesting in that way. When I got my first cassette 4-track in 1988 it was basically a way to experiment with ideas. In 2024 I think AI tools are still in that phase. People who are using them now are how I used them in the late 80s with my new 4-track