Lee Barry's Blog, page 9

Some of the Parts

 Part of Parts Technologies enable the past in ways that were inconceivable in the past. Before scanners were invented, we could duplicate a paper document, but digitization made it possible for it to exist indefinitely. Remix made it possible for us to use parts of it in other contexts in many new ways that were inconceivable to the author at the time of its writing. For example, a

Riffs On Riffs

 Last night I was watching some footage from the David Gilmour Luck and Strange tour, specifically Great Gig In the Sky, where in place of the vocal improv by Clare Tory, they had a female vocal ensemble based on it–essentially a “scored” piece. It’s interesting that something spontaneous can later be arranged and played as if it was through-composed. (Brian Eno once called it a “deceit”. If

Of A Piece

  Wooden Graffiti When we think about something that is “of a piece”, say, the life of an artwork over a century, it gathers meaning over the generations. The individual parts of a work function as an integral whole. This has been my MO for decades now where everything that I do fits in with some other aspect of something else at a system or conceptual level. For example, a photograph

Jazz AI (Cont)

 Improvisation is a form of spontaneous composition that uses predetermined structural elements, usually chords and scales. Jazz improvisation is understood as being free-form, but is controlled with rules. In Arabic music, there is Taqsim, guided by a different system of rules for improvisation—and similarly with Indian Raga. The eastern versions of improvisation have an additional cultural

On the Practice of Music

 People don’t need an understanding of music theory to appreciate music. But I will qualify that by saying that having some understanding—or a curiosity about it—would do wonders for music in general. It would make us more sophisticated listeners, which we once were at one point. I noticed a drop in music appreciation around the time of Napster, which made music into a cheap disposable item

Using Versus Playing

  Playing musical instruments demonstrates just how slow the brain is in gaining new skills. Computers are a nice shortcut to aptitude that don’t involve years of practicing. Operating systems and most software are committed to being user-friendly. (It is interesting that practice as a concept has progressively devolved. We don’t practice using a computer, we tend to simply use it, like

Musing Versus Music

 Back in the 90s I wrote an essay titled Musing Versus Music, in which I suggested coming up with a new term, “musicist”—like a physicist that studies music. So when you’re a musicist you’re not only focused on performance and composition, you’re interested in a lot of different areas—you’re interested in the overlaps with other technologies. In the 90s we were 15 years into sampling at that

Cameraless Photography

9/13/2014 Your eyes always take the best pictures. A snapshot can get close to what is seen with the eyes, but a more intense photographic image takes a long time to create, or become more relevant over time, as in documentary photography.[9/13/2024: Once you begin taking photographs with your first camera, you start seeing the world in a different way–even if your camera wasn’t armed to take

New Definitions of Skill

  The Rifts album was a ‘Turing Test’ for music to see whether a human with meager skills at the piano can improvise in a mode better than an algorithm. The next step would be to code the algorithm to do the same thing. Will the machine create better music in terms of the ‘free will’ that humans use when playing music? Will it understand the conceptual elements or metaphors? When humans

Give AI Music A Hand

Not to applaud it, but to put our hands on it--to interact and reshape it--to collaborate with it as a human-in-the-loop.As AI music evolves, I'm still looking for ways to use it either as a tool, or to use as subjects for appropriation. Some sites are clearly better at generation, but I'm not interested in that as much as seeing where my own ideas go--not only in the early provisional demos, but