Lee Barry's Blog, page 13

Representational Frames

What I see in AI music now are the same old tropes of the merging of man and machine. But in context with that, there are lots of other conversations that are going on about the pitfalls of becoming too entranced with machines. Not that it's new--we've been doing it for over a century now since the Futurist movement in the early 20th century, although back then it was more about flight and

State of AI

 AI has increasingly become a polemic between people who have been studying it for a long time and people who are just getting into it. The latter group of people are singing its praises, just as people were back when the PCs came out. If you look back into that period in the late 70s and into the 80s there were groups of people who were also on opposite ends of that technology—people who

On Generative/Generated Music

 6/7/2015Alas, generative music never took off. For a while it was thought to be the future, where music would randomly compose itself from individual segments stored in a database--essentially a music AI. But I've had a change of heart about it, at least from a musical standpoint (and may change again) but there is another use, namely using it to track usage and rights.Bitcoin may

Cicada Sounds

Today is the Music For Places anniversary. In my diary entry of 6/2/2006 I noted, "In the background faintly is the sound of a soda machine, clicking like an insect or bird of some kind". If I were to re-create it, it would be like this:  The sounds of cicadas aren't pitched, but the one I'm hearing outside my window is approximately an E-natural, which can be put into some kind of

Is Postmodern Art On the Decline?

 David Bowie (Modernist) Paintings I see it both flourishing and declining, which might mean that we view it as a both-and situation where artists have a wider range of philosophical positions. In music, I tend to alternate between pre-modern (classical, folk, ethnic) and postmodern (pop, electronic, ambient, experimental) and see them as being equally viable creatively. In visual art,

Book of Days

 Yesterday I was reading an interesting article by Cory Doctorow about Linkrot, and the fact that content not even a decade old has dead hyperlinks. Then I stumbled on an article from May 2023 I had saved about an art exhibit in my area about making art out of the data of everyday life, and I realized that's what I have been doing all along: If you become a collector of life events you can

Look At The Order In Which You Do Things

  ...is one of Eno's Oblique Strategies. In music, it's easier to start with sounds because you won't have to deal with them later. The way it used to work is that writers would sit in front of a piano or use a guitar, and even notate it on staff paper. Orchestrators and arrangers were the "producers" then, who gave music a sound beyond just piano and voice.Ever since the recording

Her Voice

 As I've been exploring the text-to-song idea I realize that it's still in its talking-head phase, in the transition between the spoken voice and singing voice. Eventually, text-to-speech voices will be text-to-song, with a melodic prosody to them. It's kind of an exciting idea, and will probably come very quickly because we're already at the stage where it has become an inflection point.&

Double Covers

 The recording itself makes the song. Some people intimately identify with recordings, which is one of the primary reasons that people like to hear cover music as close to the recording as possible. It's the recording that echoes in our heads, not the song itself being performed with just the voice and accompaniment. It's the emotion in the sounds draped around the musical framework of the

RIP Frank Stella (The Disappearing Modernists)

 Hiraqla Variation II (1968)After hearing that Frank Stella died I started to read some articles about him, as well as other articles about modernism, and I stumbled on an article that was published in August 2022 titled The Disappearing Modernists, published in The American Scholar, talking about the double standard between modernism in music and modernism in art. Stella was a modernist,