Lee Barry's Blog, page 2

Cool & Wet

 A friend suggested I do a how-to video on AI song generation. Isn't it all self-explanatory? Not really. I see it as a kind of "whispering". Sell You a Bridge took perhaps 25 "captures" which resulted in 12 curated songs, all the while refining the lyric. What's disappointing is that while the lyric might be finished in the final machine iteration, the music isn't. You're stuck with it.

On Photorealism

 Jeff Wall -- A Gust of Wind An errant diary entry 7/7/2017:On photorealism: Artists who work in this genre are interested in 1) the technical challenge, 2) absurdity of the exercise, and 3) the inherent irony of the process. I am reminded of the work of Charles Sheeler whose work was largely based on photographs that he took, which I think was tremendously compelling visually—not to

AI Soul

 Recently, a Google engineer was claiming that one of the robots that he was working on had sentience but there was an article that came out as a rebuttal that was saying that artificial intelligence is essentially a tool used to make decisions. In the last paragraph, he said that ideas about robot sentience should be left to poets (and probably musicians) but even then, when musicians are

At The Controls

 The way we think about artificial intelligence can inform how we use artificial intelligence. What would be interesting is a system where you’d have separate channels on a mixing board and then use those as random elements to introduce into the music at various points—similar to opening a book or turning on the radio. In terms of an interface, you’d have some kind of a control that would

Harmony As Everything

 AI-Generated CyanotypeThe composer really is the controller of emotion at the harmonic level. If a composer gets a commission to write the music (or even choose the music as a director) for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth at some point (she is 93), a consideration of the cultural elements is supremely important. This is where Universals become useful. Perhaps over time, traditions themselves

Do LLMs Have Soul?

   (Dictated with some edits)Artificial intelligence surprisingly has more soul than it used to have. 10 years ago when the first songs were released and created with AI, they had a strange warbled sound to them which I thought was kind of interesting. Now many AI generations are very realistic. But there's this idea that AI isn't capable of making us feel emotions the way humans

Song Demos 1997/2025

It's interesting to compare the demo process from 1997 to 2025. Back in 1997, I would typically write lyrics and possibly some music, and then go out and try to find session players and vocalists to create demos to shop around to publishers. It might take weeks or months, but now it takes just minutes to generate a few demos. This particular lyric was never used in a song, but I did have

Creativity Systems

 An AI-generated analysis of selected blog entries on systems. 

Different Kinds of Knowing

 Eventually, music AI will become more sophisticated, and we will be able to select more complex chord changes, choose keys and meters, and so on. But if we can simply select those things from a drop-down, is there a difference between the simple selection of options and intimately knowing something? For example, if you generate a jazz head that is composed of ii-V-I patterns through several

Aja@100

 Patti Mitsui, the model for the Aja cover (1998)Imagine it's fall 2077, and you're a songwriter and you're going to record an album that's going to use session players. 100 years ago, the band Steely Dan started to record their album Aja using all session musicians. Now, all the session musicians are AI, and you have hundreds of different players that you can choose from. The cost is about