Lee Barry's Blog, page 3

Containers of Music

 I was thinking about the connection between instruments and Identity and the music which exists naturally within a particular instrument. For example a violin has an identity and a music that exists within it; a guitar has a different life within it; a bass guitar has a different life within it. When I play them there's a resonance–the instrument is changing me. When I'm playing a guitar

Wriffs

Back in 2021, I started my “riffs” series, where I would record my ideas either as an audio file or as a video, and then would take the transcripts and use them as a basis for my writing. But there's a difference between writing done as dictation, and writing done as we normally do. What's interesting now with LLMs is that you can have them analyze your transcripts. They make them very concise–

Dataomes

 In terms of book reading, especially non-fiction, I want to read something that I haven’t seen elsewhere. But the internet is that “elsewhere”—a place where we can find things that already exist. I find that most of the books that I’ve chosen to read because of a book review (usually on the ol’ Arts & Letters Daily) haven’t been that interesting in terms of new information. For younger

Datomes

 In terms of book reading, especially non-fiction, I want to read something that I haven’t seen elsewhere. But the internet is that “elsewhere”—a place where we can find things that already exist. I find that most of the books that I’ve chosen to read because of a book review (usually on the ol’ Arts & Letters Daily) haven’t been that interesting in terms of new information. For younger

Soapboxes

 If you want to be a musician activist, you're probably going to have to be like Roger Waters. I think he does it very well because he has the archetype and has those skills. This doesn't mean that we have to agree with him, but he does a soapbox very well. I don't think anybody can. I know we feel it's incumbent on us at this moment to be activists and share our opinions, but it has to

Music For Titles

Usually it's the other way around, but back in the Tin P and Brill  days, musical ideas came from the natural rhythms in a title idea, and typically became the chorus. Musical ideas were also driven by rhythmic riffs in language, such as "Shave an a haircut, two bits" riff which became a Blues riff.These are drawn from the excellent book Historically Black Phrases. 

Earth Day Recap 1997-2025

 AI  makes it very easy to summarize big data sets, in this case over 25 years of diary entries. I first started noticing the change in February of 1997 when there was a long stretch of days that were in the 60s and 70s. It begs the question whether anomalous weather events are just freak events and have normally occurred in history over the past couple of centuries in the same

On Spirituality (In Music)

AI-analyses are good for writers who like to hear their thoughts read back to them, especially with my Dynaxioms, which can be cryptic in retrospect, and I get to revisit them to see if I still agree with them.Here are my postscripts: 0035: ‘Reason’ meaning Apollonian.0149: Music provides a good look into how the brain can rewire. In music, it only happens while engaged with it as a listener

Anything In Nature

  One of the books I’m reading now is Red Write Own by Chris Dixon. There’s a section in which he predicts is going to be the next version of the internet and how we’re going to deal with intellectual property on the internet using the blockchain and using what he calls “modding”, a term borrowed from gaming, whereby gamers will take bits of code from existing works and weave them into

On Serialization (AI-Analysis)

Another AI-generated analysis by Google Gemini Based on the following blog posts. I find these summaries really useful in helping me understand my own thinking process, but when you’re listening to robots talk about your work, lots of inaccuracies can slip by. The term "Creativity Machine" is not mentioned in the sources. It's making inferences, which is a kind of "hallucination". Creativity