Lee Barry's Blog, page 8

America Is Every Kind of Movie

 The term "projection" is probably on the up-slope on Google N-Gram, probably since 2015-2016. In politics, Trump runs the projector, but everybody has a projector and a screen that they carry around, with film reels of all the people they know. You intimately know your own films, your friends might not know them. You don't know theirs. In a group of three or more people, there are many

On Roots (Cont)

 Watched a performance of Pat Martino who just died last week. It was a duet with a piano player on a standard. A friend commented that he didn't think that it was substantive--he was just playing scales and it didn't seem to have any form at all. I made the counterargument that younger metal players just play fast arpeggios. It's not compositional. But he argued that it is compositional and

Election Day Musings

Some October entries and postscripts:10/1/2009Read article by Gore Vidal: “We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US.”[10/1/2024: At 15 years, it’s an interesting juxtaposition that Jimmy Carter, a standard bearer of the spiritual nature of democracy turns 100 today]. 10/2/1998Interview on NPR with Serbian government official. The interviewer asked with rhetorical disbelief: ‘‘Isn’t there

A Dogs World

 Nosound Release Cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Dogs’ Featuring Tim BownessApparently, David Gilmour is playing Madison Square Garden on election night.It's interesting to think about the evolution of Pink Floyd since the 70s, and what they meant to boomer musicians. They were a seminal band for me, and they are almost sacred in that regard. But will anyone be able to fully drink it that moment,

The Music of Language (Cont)

 Re: the article: Finding the music of speech: Musical knowledge influences pitch processing in speech.  “Even if music- and language-specific processes are observed among adults, this does not mean that such processes are innately domain-specific. Specialization could result from developmental processes and interaction with language and music throughout childhood. Statistical learning

Lonely Woman

 A Woman With No Friends (Generated with ChatGPT)Recently, I was watching a YouTube video of what appeared to be a speech by Oprah, A Woman With No Friends, but I don't think she ever gave such a speech. When I attempted to locate a transcript, I couldn't (easily) find it, only to find many channels with videos made with that text used as captions, even "Oprah Winfrey Podcast", which calls

A 2046 Album Review

  From the short story Reset 2046:Review of Strategic Erasure published in Rolling Stone: Nth makes a concerted effort to bring us back to the deep roots of old-timey pop music of the 1970s. Neone’s personal journey from mortality to immortality, and all the constituent memories, get woven into the songwriting. Women are less likely to erase memories as they seem to become so attached

Idea To Product (Cont)

 I just finished Daniel Levitin's I Heard There Was A Secret Chord. In the chapter about using songwriting to treat PTSD, he writes, "Music helps us express and process emotions that we cannot express in words, to others or even to ourselves."Music can be thought of as a proxy for language--a kind of "emoji", but when you're writing lyrics, it can be an obsession over words, and can go on

New Views of You

 da Vincis It's interesting to observe how a player’s technique changes over time--and to think about other ways you've changed.A few days ago I was watching a recent concert by Sting (Sting 3.0), and then watched some Police concert footage from 1979, and I realized that over time a player's technique can drastically change. Back in 1979 he played quite differently, using a pick on

A 2048 Album Review

 A fictional album review from my book Reset 2046, written in 2014 (with a few edits). It's an interesting way to prototype music you might want to write yourself as a scenario. In 2046 a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is an instrument. That probably will be a reality a lot sooner than 2046. These can be written as a roman a clef, for example, a real review, say, from 1971 which uses all