tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31670212024-03-16T09:17:58.438-05:00Musings on Music (mostly)Thoughts on art, music, and how they relate to current events.Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.comBlogger975125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-12519060879994912462024-03-16T09:17:00.000-05:002024-03-16T09:17:24.890-05:00From Time To TimeUsing randomness to generate song ideas is obviously nothing new. Even Mozart used chance methods in composition back in the 19th century--and we can presume the use of randomness could go back even tens of thousands of years. We like to believe that large language models can do this better but that's an illusion. Anyone can make up algorithms that ultimately are more interesting and Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-37806863765394194532024-03-09T08:36:00.004-06:002024-03-10T11:38:43.110-05:00 Souls Of Their OwnI was wondering if you could have a spiritual postmodernism and whether you could do "spiritual" or mystical work in a postmodern context. In visual art, you could still be postmodern, but it can have a spiritual dimension. We want to think that it doesn't and that metamodernism is a way to be "spiritual" at the same time as being modern and postmodern. It's an interesting question. It's an art Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-72476217964450945382024-03-02T07:21:00.002-06:002024-03-04T07:42:41.904-06:00Alternate Tunings For Life (Cont) The current tuning I've been exploring is E-G#-D-F# (which now has the moniker "Drop 31" (or "Drop 13") because the third and first strings are dropped a half-step from standard tuning. I've now been giving them short names such as "G5" or "F7", or "Yesterday"--any tuning where all the strings are lowered a whole step--as a riff on Paul McCartney's use of it on Yesterday so as to put the Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-49068118899652300512024-02-25T20:53:00.001-06:002024-02-25T20:53:00.235-06:00Isms In Creativity Source Unknown How is it that we can multitask on things that use different brain hemispheres and determine where they fall on the "ism" spectrum: premodern, modern, postmodern, metamodern (or remodern)? When I'm working on music, I feel it's more modernist, but postmodern in the sense that I might be thinking about the art of it, and a metamodernist in the sense that it can be all Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-32833268817478614622024-02-24T10:20:00.001-06:002024-02-24T10:25:36.792-06:00On Filterworld This book confirms a lot of my thinking over the past 20 years where it was all heading. I recall the early days of collaborative filtering during my time as a part-time web designer in the aughts. Back then, most people wanted a web hit counter and a way to give ratings. Before that, boomers and genx didn’t grow up with the ubiquity of ratings, whereas it is a fixture of younger Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-42653432615955652082024-02-17T07:53:00.001-06:002024-02-17T07:53:27.447-06:00AI Art MovementsHow will the ideas of minimalism and maximalism and other artistic philosophies be interpreted in AI art going forward? Will there be movements within the AI art? At this point, AI art defies being labeled. It is certainly an aesthetic movement but not a philosophical movement--yet. I had thought Google DeepDream would establish a Movement for digital art, as fractal art did for a while back in Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-68416830123036026052024-02-15T20:43:00.004-06:002024-02-16T08:55:29.118-06:00Mapping TimeA great reference book on the topic.Some numbers as written by the Maya, a dot stands for one, a bar for 5,
and a ovoid for a zero. Numbers are written vertically in a base 20
system. Marshack’s interpretation of the Blanchard plaque on the moon phases. Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-24553007932509367242024-02-12T07:13:00.002-06:002024-02-12T07:13:48.272-06:00Alternate West2/12/2012: Album idea: "Alternate West", all songs that use an alternate tuning of some kind. Use only guitars and basses, with the bass treated more as guitar, run through guitar effects. No drums. Use some of strategies as well. Make it sound like William Eggleston...[This eventually became both Music For Photographs--which included a photo by Eggleston (Red Room Mississippi) and Frontiers].Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-5414406439097260342024-02-11T06:53:00.001-06:002024-02-11T07:01:08.044-06:00 Alternate Tunings For LifeLast night I had a conversation with a friend about how we perceive music as guitar players. His way of looking at the instrument as patterns that can be placed at certain positions of the neck, and squaring that with what is being played against. It's an intuitive way of finding something that sounds right perhaps with an eye more towards style rather than something that is more technically Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-18773244637315369442024-02-04T11:26:00.001-06:002024-02-04T11:26:00.130-06:00Photos Taken On A Weekend During the week, suburbs can be veritable ghost towns, but on the weekends they spring to life when people can be disabused of the daily grind. I'm reminded of a photo taken by Robert Adams in 1970 taken during his trip through Colorado. This photo obviously wasn’t taken on a weekend and is emblematic of the bleakness of American suburbia, a generation after the postwar suburban boom circa Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-54980415947939023672024-02-04T08:40:00.005-06:002024-02-04T08:42:53.408-06:00February 4ths 2/4/1998Read interview in Computerlife with Brian Eno. He was talking about the generative nature of future music in which pieces are started from seed ideas and grow organically and evolve naturally, which mimics the way folk music resonates through culture. Computer programs also will have these types of characteristics whereby they are designed to develop and learn with experience, just Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-66503567298116825632024-02-03T10:35:00.027-06:002024-02-03T10:35:00.134-06:00 Technostalgia (Cont)I've started creating videos for some of my albums. Last night I created a playlist of all the songs on the Thorne Rooms album. It's an interesting variation of looking at the album graphics as you're listening. It works well in this case because you can look at the rooms while listening to the music, which is optimal for this particular concept. The idea was that the rooms are period film sets Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-50725169823652015842024-01-28T14:30:00.004-06:002024-01-28T14:30:00.156-06:00Aesthetic Erosion (Rock Records) I've been watching some of the documentaries by geologist Myron Cook. People generally have found geology to be a boring subject, but I've always liked it for its useful metaphors. In this episode, he was talking about erosion taking place over millions of years in which unconformities of erosion occur. This relates to my aesthetic erosion idea as a metaphor to describe the erosive Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-33916306469885859792024-01-27T15:40:00.003-06:002024-01-27T15:40:52.817-06:00 Is Sound a Song?I think in postmodernism it is because anything-goes in postmodernism. In pop music it's always the sound that counts first; it's what hits a person's ears within the first couple seconds. Music relies on time and so it takes time for you to absorb it. But in postmodernism, in the pop world, everything has to happen within seconds, so it's impossible for music (in the modernist or premodernist Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-54462075006541904282024-01-20T06:48:00.002-06:002024-01-27T09:53:48.005-06:00Days In A Life Album releases are a special time for me. They're sort of like birthdays or Christmas. But there's always quite a bit of deliberation on the release date. Apparently, Fridays are good release days and I chose the 19th of January because as I've looked back at my diary entries (as well as other diaries for January--specifically those in The Complete Beatles, a studio diary 1963-1970), there Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-49044557244649863882024-01-14T18:56:00.007-06:002024-02-15T12:25:19.858-06:00The Duration of Art John Cage -- As Slow As Possible On Dynaxiom 2777: "Visual art is like music with different durations depending on how long you look at it." Most art is looked at for under 30 seconds but can be as long as a lifetime if you look at it daily." For example, if you're at a museum and standing in front of a painting, you look at it for a couple of seconds, look at the caption card, Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-17022348528413624752024-01-07T07:46:00.000-06:002024-01-07T07:46:26.755-06:00My AI (Cont.) As an experiment, I used a text randomizer on all my November 10 diary entries. It's just a melange of words and makes absolutely no sense, but I found two usable rhythms and mapped various words over them and a song idea emerged. (It's interesting what you can do with just a little bit of algorithm that you can make yourself). We tend to want to use things right out of whatever the latest Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-20338704959039991072024-01-06T06:56:00.002-06:002024-01-06T06:58:25.293-06:00The Evolution Of Emulation As I've been reading sections of Geddy Lee's memoir My Effin' Life, I realized that his experiences as a young musician were a common experience among a lot of musicians from that time. We all played along with the radio and records as the then form of emulation. You'd find that in any generation when the youth rally around new forms of art and music, a process of emulation begins: the Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-10643621093920351392024-01-03T06:57:00.002-06:002024-02-18T06:23:54.192-06:00IS There Life On Mars? IS there life on Mars?Sometimes when I watch the Mars Rover videos I wonder that if you lived in a colony there, and were looking out the window across a rocky landscape--perhaps with a low mountain range on the horizon--whether it would always be a numinous experience. I would imagine that would fade over time where you'd lose the appreciation for the strangeness of the environment Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-67338854877370129912023-12-31T05:00:00.000-06:002023-12-31T05:00:27.808-06:00Year Frontiers When you work in systems things can go on indefinitely. The way I work, especially in music, is to create a series. An album is a series just as artwork can be serialized. [My Intervals series is an example. I started it so I could continue it indefinitely if I decided (resolved) to]. It's a CONTINUA-TION. The problem with New Year's resolutions is that they typically don't really relyLee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-26924775627705921622023-12-24T14:51:00.005-06:002023-12-27T06:27:31.036-06:00December Weather Diary (Chicago) [People my senior say they remember 70s in the 70s. The nature of climate change is that people would have always be seeing it compared to what they had experienced before].12/3/1998, 12/4/1998. Almost 70 degrees. So warm people are dining al fresco. 12/31/1999, Friday. Gorgeous day, 45 degrees. 12/18/2002. Warm, 60 degrees. (El Nino year) 12/21/2003. Warm winter. Still no snow, almost 40 Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-52582162223398932722023-12-20T05:48:00.000-06:002023-12-20T05:48:10.140-06:00Sea Changes It's been my long-running theory that 1966 was a sea change year when the whole mood of the planet started to change. I started to spot it in recordings released mid to late-1960s. Obviously, The Beatles were at the forefront of that experimentation (such as playing things backward and various other studio experiments), but it wasn't necessarily the result of things changing in the world-Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-45879180769615742022023-12-16T08:37:00.008-06:002024-01-03T06:58:35.904-06:00On The Evolution of IdeasThe longer you've been working on something solutions will come to you, sometimes years later. It's never the case that things are resolved when you're first working on them. With each piece of art that I've made, I worked on it until I felt that it was resolved. With several pieces in progress, I can keep them all in view and see things I want to add or change. One day you don't see anything Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-29059538792034241662023-12-10T13:33:00.002-06:002023-12-10T13:37:31.771-06:00AI Is A Cliche MachineHere are some December 10ths, along with December 10ths generated by ChatGPT where I didn't have an entry. As usual, they are very cliche, written in purple prose. The inferences are accurate, but I'm not sure what black box it comes from, or what was scraped to make the inferences.12/10/1960, SaturdayJohn Lennon goes on long train journey back to Liverpool from Hamburg with his amp strapped to Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-85456567544081327412023-12-10T11:40:00.005-06:002024-01-03T06:59:28.083-06:00 Elevator ArtI haven't been to a museum or a gallery in a while and I kind of miss it. I was just thinking about that when I was scrolling through a social media feed and looking at photographs. When you go to a gallery you can walk around; it's a horizontal experience. If you see something in the distance you can walk over and look at it. That was the experience I had when I went to the SOFA and EXPO shows Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0