Lee Barry's Blog, page 5

What Does It Mean?

There are different ways that you can go about getting something to have an “aboutness”. Randomness can be a good starting point where you're just playing around with words and they don't necessarily mean anything. But as you move them around they start to suggest meaning. As I’ve been experimenting with AI in songwriting, I either start with a fragment of an idea, a paragraph from an essay,

Picassiana

  Some Picasso quotes:About children's work: When I was their age I could draw like them, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn how to draw like them.[This perhaps has to do with learning how to be more of a right-hemispheric person--if that is even possible. People who become this is usually the result of getting struck by lightning--like the orthopedic surgeon who became

AI Country

 With AI music anybody can put out a country record these days. This is my first one, which is kind of odd for me, someone who is mostly an arty postmodernist guy releasing mostly ambient music. Actually, even though it sounds generic, it is postmodern in the sense that it's based on a concept, which is important now because if you use these generators the probability that songs are going to

Is There Still a 'Future Music'?

 The Ondes Martenot If we listened to today’s pop from the vantage of 1950, it would sound stupid and/or broken. That wasn’t the future then, at least in pop music. It was Les Paul and Mary Ford, or anything using electric instruments. This was really the first “going electric”, and I would imagine purists hated it. The future is always in harsh un-patterened noise, that is continually

Inputs And Outputs (Cont.)

 Whenever I create a new blog post I sometimes go through my older ones. Today I posted something about alternate tunings and then I ran a quick search across the blog to see what I had written about it in the past and I came across one that was from June 2014 where I was talking about the essence of bass parts, where some are functional and some are more busy, and I was talking about James

The Music of Language (Cont)

 In terms of the connection between language and music, there is a finite number of rhythms that can be extracted from poetry and prose—probably in any language. If you read a passage in a book out loud, sometimes you will come upon phrases that are inherently musical. The musicality of language (prosody) arises from the stresses on syllables, which have to be either on an upbeat or a

On Rhythm

 Redmoon Drum Tree Selected entries from Dynaxiom3052. The door to jazz is through rhythm. If you don't like jazz, your body probably doesn't understand swing--or it actually does, and your mind gets in the way.2595. The 'job description' of a songwriter can now include "contributed to a machine learning training set" as one of the skills. In the past, contributing an original riff or

Jazz 2010@15

  My thoughts on the Jazz 2010 article: Rule-breaking in music (or art) has its own breaking point. Musical elements are not infinitely malleable. Once you have twisted something in one direction, you only have the option of moving it back to its ‘normal’ state or all the way in the opposite direction.In terms of jazz harmony, you move back to triads or dyads and add extensions via

If ___ Produced ____

I had a thought experiment once which was, “What if this person produced that person?”. What if Brian Eno produced Metallica, what if Trent Reznor produced a Sting album, and so on. With the passing of David lynch, I've also been thinking about his role in music, and how unique it is. I think Lynch probably would have made an excellent record producer because he looks at things in a different way

AI Music Process

 As I've been using AI to generate music, the process seems to be as follows: Initial idea from an existing lyric line (perhaps inspired by something I'm reading in a book or article), find the music in the words, engage in wordplay, notate the rhythms (wordrums), find new meaning in the ambiguity, create a verse or chorus, choose a style/genre, generate iterations, write more lyrics against