Lee Barry's Blog, page 4

When Democracy Builds

Taking photographs at rallies is kind of a challenge. You have preconceived ideas of the shots that you want, but typically you don't get them. The turnout at the Hands Off! rally in Oak Park was the largest I’d experienced there. There were rallies during Occupy Wall Street in 2011, but nothing compared to what transpired yesterday. When I review photographs after the fact, I look for either

Music Is Weird

 Or “Is Music Weird?” This is an AI analysis of transcripts of riffs from March of 2021 when I was reading the book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, and I was thinking how music is actually weird in Western culture, neatly compartmentalized into our daily lives, now mostly as recordings, and also as recordings

The Infinity Mirror Room of AI

The new AI Technologies are tremendously useful but I think we might be moving too fast and are too excited about using them, especially for writers who have a body of work and have released books. It's interesting to have AI analyze them and talk about them. When you first listen to them it's quite amazing, but there are many inaccuracies and they miss all the nuances that would be required for

On "The Uncanny Muse"

 It's interesting that in the early days of mechanical instruments like the orchestrelle and pianola in the early part of the 20th century, people were buying them because they wanted to vicariously play with “feeling, but if you look at it from the aspect of what is actually happening cognitively when you play music and play it with “feeling”, is different from a machine activating mirror

Ship (Trunk) of Theseus

 Yesterday on my walk I was thinking about music history and I saw it as a trunk that gets sent around the world over many hundreds of years. The trunk arrives in various locations and people go through it and they take what they want to use--books, photographs, weavings, little artifacts, and instructions like recipes. People take what they want and then it's pushed off into the sea and it

On Emulation

As I was going through my old article compilations from the early 2000s, I stumbled on an article about Tom Waits when he released his Blood Money album, and he had been working with the granddaughter of Leon Theremin (playing theremin). I love this line: “She was a true Russian, the musical equivalent of the good butcher who uses every part of the cow." He also said, "The best comment on a piece

Robot Reviews

What's immediately interesting about these machine-generated reviews is that they kind of wash over you and  if you're not vigilant, things might actually be incorrect. I haven't gone through it to determine whether the analysis is correct or not, but I think for the most part it is, and is interesting in the sense that it is giving me insights that I wouldn't have gotten from other people.

Cut-up 2025

 Back in 1995, a few years before the advent of the internet, the Verbisizer was developed for David Bowie to create cut-up  lyrics, which he used on his Outside album. We can do the same thing now using large language models and chatbots to generate random lines from disparate data sets, then rearrange the lines in a musical way. I'm now Google’s LLM software and Poe to generate lyrics

Waiting For Spring

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 convinced of the idea of the seasons of history: the power of suggestion is then too powerful to bring them on: “It’s the Fourth Turning, so we need to create

AI 2011 To Today

 February 17, 2011Thoughts on Watson AI, with 2025 comments in bold text:True intelligence has myriad different modules. It would take a long time to construct them, but could be done. [I recently watched a Kevin Kelly interview on David Eagleman's channel. They were talking about different AIs (minds) for different purposes, as you would use different software or apps for various tasks. I