Lee Barry's Blog, page 14

Scales and Extensions

 Frank Stella Sculptures (2024)I was thinking about scales again-- not scales in music--but the scales of organisms. One of the main themes of the book Scale by Geoffrey West is that organisms can't be any smaller or bigger than they are and consequently can't extend themselves any more than nature allows. This applies to humans as well, but what's different about humans is that we have the

Convergence Versus Divergence

 Which is more effective--convergence amid divergence, or divergence amid convergence? If you're just playing around with ideas you're in divergent mode: you haven't started doing anything--you haven't put anything on paper or canvas--you're just throwing things around and experimenting. When you're in convergence mode you're taking all the things that you gathered and you're starting to

Earth Days

  4/22/1817, Halifax (Anne Lister Diary)Bought Droiiet's flute piece God Save The King. Apparently the composer made 20 guineas a week playing around London. 4/22/1906, Stanford, San Francisco, Sunday (6 days after the earthquake)(William James Correspondence)To Miss Frances R. Morse:"...Well, when I lay in bed at about half-past five that morning, wide-awake, and the room began to

The Internet As A Musical Instrument

My observation on how things have evolved over the past few years with artificial intelligence is that creators are now using the internet exclusively to generate content. Just as the recording studio became an instrument in the 1960s, the internet is now an instrument. Using the internet is probably the preferred way now rather than going to the art store and getting art supplies. Ironically, it

TTS (Text To Song)

Words can change everything in music; Language is music. Even if we don't fully understand or embrace AI in an artistic practice, it is nonetheless interesting to run A-B comparisons to see if the final results of either satisfy our objectives. It is perhaps too easy to let algorithms attempt to satisfy them. In the past when I've tried Boomy, the generative music became the proxy, as in this

Beyond Music and Instruments

In 2015 I wrote an essay, Beyond Music, that posed the hypothetical that since the 17th century to the present, the sound of an instrument and the instrument itself started to be separated. So a violin in the 17th century sounded like a violin and composers wrote for the sound of the violin. The advent of electricity allowed us to electronically manipulate sound: we can mic a violin but that's

On Selective Attention

All of life is about selective attention. People will look where they want to look. Even if they look at something that they think is interesting, their selective attention is directing it elsewhere. It's the "peripherique" idea: they're looking at the frame because someone said something about the frame and they're looking at that and not seeing what's inside the frame--even though they might

R.I.P. Richard Serra

 As a photographer, and probably for all photographers who have taken photographs of Serra's work, it frames the sky in interesting ways. This is a way for one art form to have a relationship with another. Photographing art makes it generative. I've always used photographs of my own work not only as a form of documentation but to create "child" works. Serra always talked about the

Cameraless Photos

  Robert Heinecken - Recto/Verso Portfolio, 1989  There was a photo exhibition at the Art Institute about 10 years ago that primarily featured Polaroids. In one of the works, the photos were flipped so that it showed just the backs of the photos with writing on them. As you read them, an image would appear in your imagination. In many

Music: An Important Digression

...is a chapter in Daniel Dennett's latest book, I've Been Thinking. I wasn't aware how much he was involved in music when he was younger. He's mentioned it in his talks but I wasn't aware of the degree that he was involved in playing in all kinds of orchestras and bands, and he has a good knowledge of jazz harmony as an arranger.My first Dennett book was Consciousness Explained which I read in