Lee Barry's Blog, page 26

Knowledge Nostalgia

 
 If you listened to a rock music station in 1977, and you were playing along with the radio as a way to learn an instrument, you would have been playing along with ZZ Top songs. I know I was, but I’ve since forgotten what it was like to play that way.Once one form of learning is replaced there’s no going back. But one of the ways of getting off the grid of the replaced “wiring” is to

Using AI in the Songwriting Process

This is my first official piece created with AI, albeit with some 'treatments', Timber Cities on the Edge of Nature, an ambient piece.  Over the past few weeks I have been spending a little bit of time trying to find something interesting and useful in AI music. The one that I used that was kind of interesting is called Boomy. It creates tracks by selecting genres, sub-genres, and instruments,

Speech-To-Music

If you took speech and put it through some kind of a synthesizer this is the kind of music that would be created. This brings up an interesting point about the intersection between music and language. Language by itself isn't inherently musical; It's something that we have to add to it in order for it to make musical sense. In other words, language isn't music right out of the box. But sometimes

Havenhurst

 Havenhust is a side street off of the Sunset Strip, a horror movie, and an old mill in Missouri that burned down in the 1920s. It's also a track on my latest album Music For Photographs that initially had nothing to do with those things. It's an example of a spin-off of one element (in this case a middle eight) from something to make something completely different, yet associate them in new ways

Are You A Waters or Gilmour Person, Or Both?

The good thing about technology is that it lets us cut to the chase right away. The reason I have been thinking about this was because I was watching some interviews with Roger Waters given over 20 or 30 years. I was also thinking about how music and philosophy go together or don't go together, or how they overlap on the Venn diagram.In terms of Pink Floyd, and specifically the core of the group

Born of Frustration

 One of the songs I keep playing again and again is the track Born of Frustration by the band James which came out in 1992. It has a nice gradual climb in intensity with a great vocal by Tim Booth (and trumpet echoes). The lyrics are interesting as well, which are psychologically and spiritually evergreen. Perhaps they were cryptic wordplay at the time they were written (as lyrics often are) but

Color Phoneography

 
A riff on color photography.In 2012, I created a series called Results, where I would run Google searches then take a screen capture, then run treatments on them. How neural networks "see" and interpret images has evolved since then, but they are still fairly stupid (or simply biased) in the results. Take for example the images that come up when you search "beauty", or "truth". What does truth

Does music have anything to do with climate change?

Some of the headlines just from this morning:How hot is too hot for the human body?Iconic Yellowstone Park faces startling climate threatsThe warming climate is sparking wildfires on the East CoastHow to sabotage climate legislation? An Exxon lobbyist explainsAncient creatures went north to flee climate change, now animals are doing it againWestern states face possible all-time heat records this

Some July

7/1/1997Hong Kong reverts to the Chinese.Robert Mitchum died.7/4/199765 degrees (4th of July or 4th of April?)Sojourner lands on Mars.7/5/1997Film: Face/Off with Travolta and Cage, directed by John Woo. A bit too Hollywood and maybe an hour’s worth of pointless explosions, but the whole premise is brilliant. I wish it would have focused more on the “mask” aspect and perhaps taken a more

In Love With Harmony

At least at the moment.Firstly, R.I.P. Jon Hassell. "Hassell regards his processes as a composer as quite basic. “I keep asking the central question: What is it [that] I really like? What is it that I really want to hear? It comes down to shockingly simple things: “I love lush sensual atmospheres. I love beautiful chords. I’m in love with harmony.”Yesterday, I was thinking a lot about