Lee Barry's Blog, page 15

From Time To Time

Using randomness to generate song ideas is obviously nothing new. Even Mozart used chance methods in composition back in the 19th century--and we can presume the use of randomness could go back even tens of thousands of years. We like to believe that large language models can do this better but that's an illusion. Anyone can make up algorithms that ultimately are more interesting and

Shifting Colloquiality

 Song "shopping" in the 90s sometimes involved submitting songs through TAXI, which apparently still exists. But if "song" and "songwriter" is now redefined, "shop" must also be redefined: what are we shopping for? What parts of the art are we shopping for (intros, outros, verses, choruses)? Who's buying what? These days I've fallen out of what the shopping experience is. In music I don't know

The Results of Rigor

An Ansel Adams processed through a General Adversarial NetworkWhenever I attend local art fairs, I typically notice photographers that are showing what are very cliche photographs, for example, the long exposure photograph showing the trails of stars or waterfalls showing the blurring that is created by the flowing water, and I realized not all art has to be Art. Sometimes art can also be a

Celebrations and Commemorations In An Algorithmic World

 In September 2047 it will be the 50th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana and the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II and the 46th anniversary of 9/11, as well as commemorations of events that will occur as 10th and 20th anniversaries.I had thought that YouTube's algorithm results would have featured the annual 9/11 commemoration, but it didn't. This is why organic memory is so

The Social Implications of World Music

Sometimes I revisit my World Music period in the 90s. It was a period of musical discovery and became a life-long inspiration. What is also interesting about world music is that in many cases joyful music is produced under the most oppressive circumstances and becomes a form of liberation and escape. When you experience music as a “one wold” phenomenon, as naive as it sounds now, you get the

Blue Notes

Thoughts on the film Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes:When a society can no longer provide meaning in young people's lives as it did at many points in history through the humanities--and if you devalue the humanities (for example the fact that young people didn't have musical instruments), they will find some way to make music. But the bottom-up approach, while it is useful in the beginning,

Music As A Commodity

 If commodity is defined by its usual definition, something that is bought and sold, to de-commodify music would mean to devalue the recording fixed in a medium. If each pressing of a vinyl record, owned by different individuals had a separate valuation, that record could be traded. It’s “non-fungible” in that example. If only one entity owned the entire pressing of, say, a thousand records that

Familiarity Junkies

For any productive creative person, at least initially you're not concerned about familiarity. You're focused on exploring the novelty of a new discovery and building something on that dopamine rush. I love new ideas and have had the habit of seeing what they can become--even based on a one-word title or a few lyric lines, or a chord change. But people run on familiarity because it's the primary

In the Service of Creativity

 (Hans Arp SculptureTools are the most basic form of technology, but tools can very often be confused with creativity, or obfuscate creativity. In music, focusing on the gear and the sounds may result in a good piece of music, but creativity doesn’t require that many tools—at least in the beginning. I write exclusively on an acoustic guitar, and sometimes a bass. Anything that doesn’t have to be

On Human (Art) Universals

(Weaving by Sofia Hagstrom Molle}In the book Consilience, E.O. Wilson only briefly talked about the art of weaving as a human universal and that culture, i.e. art-making, is somehow linked to genetics. (I like this theory but I'm not yet convinced that It's that cut and dried) A book he had referred to was Human Universals by Donald Brown, which is cited frequently on anthropological topics.