Lee Barry's Blog, page 23

RIP Stephen Sondheim

 It's interesting to watch all the interviews about the passing of Stephen Sondheim back-to-back with watching Get Back and thinking about and observing the creative process in general.A lot of what goes into songwriting is "reading" it or otherwise sussing it out in terms of key, tempo, and so on, or how it's "channeled". In this interview, the interviewer likens it to frottage, a rubbing of

Thanksgiving@400

 
It's the quadricentennial, double what it was in the nation's bicentennial in 1976. But in many ways the quadricentennial is more meaningful than the bicentennial. 1776 was already 150 years after Plymouth Rock, and the initial ideologies were already set in stone. It obviously wasn't called Thanksgiving originally and the history is vague on that point, as is the slaughter and consumption of

Talking Timbre

 
A few days ago I watched a video on YouTube about a poll that was taken about what the worst bass sounds were on a record. Jaco, John Entwistle, and even James Jamerson were on the list.  What I realized is that we're too focused on the sound of the bass.The bass primarily has a function. If a bass part is scored, the sound doesn't matter. Obviously it does in a production sense because we have

Pat Martino RIP

Per the Libet Experiment, the neural mechanism for your moving your hand has already fired before you make the actual motion. In terms of flow in improvisation, there is a microsecond delay from when the player’s neurons fire and when they play over some changes. For the performer, there is also a flow between the "planning" and the execution. If you're soloing over several minutes on the same

Tires & Sneakers

Very often if I want to follow a topic I'll set up a Google Alert. I set up a Google alert about six months ago to follow music AI and I receive the results every Monday morning.What I like to do, even before reading the articles, is to simply listen to some of the music that's being produced with it, and attempt to play along with it with a guitar or bass. Music is in many ways a meme in the

I Used to Dance

There is an interesting relationship between musicians and dancers. It is surprising that in some cases, the dancers are better musicians than musicians. For example, it is easier for some dancers to relate to odd time signatures as their body is already involved, whereas musicians are just holding their instruments and not moving more than their fingers in most cases.When I was younger I used to

Seasonal Thinking

 
You're burned in at 25 and it takes 5 years to make it official. As I've said, when we turn 30 we stop caring about pop culture trends. I know I did. But the 90s were the beginning of culture wars. Neil Howe, one of the authors of The Fourth Turning had theorized that culture wars were a facet of the Third Turning (1984-2008), but it's bled into the Fourth (2008-2028?). This is why I'm not

Sentics

A few days ago, I stumbled on an article about teens showing up at doctor offices with weird tics, which were attributed apparently to watching TikTok videos of young people with Tourette's Syndrome. This stands to reason in the sense that they are reacting to something rhythmic, and watching other people do it makes you want do it--like crying or dancing in certain ways.Playing music (or dancing

Beethoven X

 I think it's a great idea that you can immortalize a composer using their "dataset". I know it sounds coarse talking about Beethoven, but I think he would have loved it, yet would have also been horrified what happened to the world that would allow something like that to be possible. But it is exactly the horrors of history that allow music to evolve. If we were to immortalize say, Stravinsky,

Autocompletion

Some language training sets contain hundreds of billions of words, but only a tiny percentage of that is used in everyday speech.I often rail about things being full of cliches and formulas, but they make sense in the absence of being able to write things down to remember them (or even wanting to remember them). Cliches are shortcuts.You would think that by simply letting AI generate permutations