Lee Barry's Blog, page 19

Emojification of Culture

 Untitled Rayograph by Man Ray, 1924The interesting thing about an image-based culture is that it doesn't require articulation of any kind--or very little. This has evolved from Web 1.0 circa 2000 when people were more inclined to write more--not that there isn't writing now--but people were used to more excursive discussions over e-mail or bulletin boards or listservs. Images were simply more

Overview of the Overview

I don't recall how I first heard about Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and His Emissary, but I started to watch the author interviews. Usually I'll hear something and connect it with how I've approached music.When you perform music in a group situation or even if you're overdubbing, you're listening to the other parts and you're reacting to them. According to his theory of brain hemispheres,

Just Because

 
Gerhard Richter -- Abstraktes Bild (1980)

To be "sincere" in my view in terms of making art or music is to simply do the work. If you're just doing the work and you look at what the results are, that's what you made--and whether there'sany meaning in that or not has to be determined. Making music with machine learning might be the cool thing to do at the moment but I would be miserable doing

OEM Music

  Imagine that music was generically manufactured and you could simply re-brand it and sell it is an original product with clever marketing. That's what music AI might be and already is to some degree.Recently, a computer scientist created an algorithm that can write pop songs which uses Twitter posts as its data set. The raw output is pathetic, but that doesn't mean they can't be improved by

Slash Art

 Slow Train Coming--Bob Dylan (Music/Sculpture)
In harmony there are what we call "slash" chords--for example D/F#, a D major triad with F# in the bass, the first inversion. Or C/D, which is a C major triad with D in the bass or a D11 chord. D/C is a D major triad with C in the bass, or a third inversion dominant. D/C can also be a polychord with two major triads superimposed.Use of metaphors

Life As Software

Life is like a software version--it depends on how you get in. The first version that you buy is your experience with the software, but you don't realize what the history is. So if you buy Photoshop for the first time in 2021 you're using all the new bells and whistles that were just released. When the software first came out in the 1980s it was basically a digital dark room. I wonder how many

Too Much Evolution

  My definition of evolution in music is that which uses the past to the point where core elements are used and are reconfigured in some way. That way the initial essences are present, although they might not be recognizable. It's a manifestation of the Ship of Theseus theory where a reconstruction may or may not have the original essences and had completely evolved into a new entity, and if that

What Actually Happened

 Art is always the process of squaring what we wanted to do and what we eventually did. It's fairly rare that anyone that's creating any kind of art form that it turns out exactly the way it was envisioned. Everybody has seen a composer's score--all the scratch and scribble--as Beethoven's sketches were. Eventually the music had to be "manufactured" through the publishing process by editors and

Trauma Chains

If it is in fact true that trauma ripples through the generations, Memorial Day is a day to reflect on how that's continuing to playing out. Humans are perhaps wired to be miserable, which may serve some evolutionary purpose to keep us striving for more. Everyone has their own low set-point similar to a weight set-point, where some people can be extremely overweight because their set-point is

Frontiers

It's interesting how things can gather meaning over time--over hundreds of years or maybe even just a few weeks.A few weeks ago I released my Frontiers album. The original title was "Central Coast" (Central Coast meaning the east coast of Lake Michigan) but I didn't use it because it would have been too confusing with the central coast of California. A couple days ago I was listening to an