tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31670212026-10-21T08:54:05.890-05:00Thoughts on art, music, and how they relate to current events.Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.comBlogger1144125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-14269914507596407302026-09-19T07:53:28.630-05:002026-09-19T08:04:21.779-05:00

 If somehow all your tools went missing, and you had lots of ideas, and you still wanted to pursue them, you would find some way to do it, even if you had to remake the tools. The whole purpose of creativity and art is to be able to make something out of anything spontaneously in the moment. These days, many musicians are using AI generation tools, and those tools are always changing.

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-17081385287941149992026-09-11T16:59:23.546-05:002026-09-11T16:59:23.547-05:00

I was just watching an interview with Peter Bergen who was one of the journalists that were in Afghanistan and managed to interview Bin Laden. The thing that I always focus in on is the metaphor of film—that there’s a slippage between reality and a film. There are similarities that we put together in our heads, but they are very different, and very much like dreams. Another salient point about

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-47958533720704340802026-09-09T05:54:19.213-05:002026-09-09T05:54:19.213-05:00

Binge-listened to Blindspot: Road to 9/11. Fascinating. (I was thinking this was recently published but it was from a year ago). We all think we connected the dots, but we keep gathering more dots—the whole page is black.On the Saudi connection: Roosevelt had begun forming an alliance with King Abulaziz in 1945 for access to oil fields so as to feed the war machine. Soon after, communist paranoia

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-12614711127195138662026-09-06T08:09:31.592-05:002026-09-06T08:09:31.592-05:00

Over the years, there’s always been talk of America having to have a continuing presence after a conflict has come to some resolution and Afghanistan is the first case where we don’t have a presence—we just pulled out and there’s nothing there to hold the peace. It’s like the internet or social media where popular people have a presence and after a while it starts to become an annoyance because

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-54328109047296788862026-09-03T13:07:47.634-05:002026-09-03T13:07:47.634-05:00

Listened to a re-broadcast of an Intelligence Squared debate in 9/2011 posing the question of whether the war in Afghanistan was worth it. After the debate, those who had voted against it added even more votes against it. The former Bush official voting for the motion made a good point that the Iraq war was one of convenience: We were in the neighborhood so why not finish off Saddam? He was in

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-35964908407969404092026-09-02T06:55:39.222-05:002026-09-02T06:55:39.223-05:00

 An observation I’ve made, albeit somewhat retrospectively, is that younger musicians have a tendency to see the essence of music suffused solely in recordings. They may not fully appreciate the fact that a musician was performing on them, and that there were other layers that are not evident in a one-bar or one-note sample.Hip-hop artists who consort with jazz musicians are looking for

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-69483293117906788822026-08-30T06:58:17.985-05:002026-08-30T06:58:17.986-05:00

 On the book, Unplug: How to Break Up with Your Phone and Reclaim Your Life--essentially a how-to on how to distance oneself from a smartphone: leaving it at home, leaving it at the door when you come in, or simply getting rid of it. It’s a really old topic, perhaps going back to around 2010, and I might have blogged about it here. The new angle is that it helps us to have more conversations

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-23591993840600320882026-08-12T07:39:11.425-05:002026-08-12T07:39:11.426-05:00

 Anesidora III by Aliza RazellRecently, there was a study done that showed that if musicians released more music they would become more recognized. There were two categories: musicians who had a signature style and musicians who were more eclectic. The increase in the volume of releases in both categories showed (at least in this study) that they would have become more recognized.This again

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-28357192206590316362026-07-25T07:38:53.226-05:002026-07-29T06:03:29.072-05:00

 Eccles Tower Erosion If you use a particular technology on a daily basis, as I have with AI music for the past two years, it begins to shape your way of working: You find it enjoyable, creative, and "generative" (in the traditional sense--where one idea is creating others), but there's continuous "background hum" of doubt about it, or is another example of "aesthetic erosion", where

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-74988236732583274832026-07-13T06:22:27.155-05:002026-07-13T06:22:27.155-05:00

 Music does require a kind of "fantasy", at least initially, for the motivation to play it. That disappears when the instrument doesn't feel right, and the effort you've put in is uninspiring. People dream of playing the piano, but you might only have a small out-of-tune spinet. Your dream was that it was a grand.What we seem to value collectively is essentially a romantic one supported by a

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-65418518438386531162026-06-28T08:48:20.391-05:002026-06-28T08:48:58.335-05:00

It's better to not stop the things you used to do than to start a new way of being that never includes the things you stopped. One thing I realized as I've been watching some of the concert footage of the current Rush tour is that here's two men in their mid-70s playing music that I listened to when I was 17. By 1980, I had kind of moved on from Rush, but Rush hasn't moved on from itself.&

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-26903714680284704482026-06-28T07:37:04.372-05:002026-06-28T07:37:04.372-05:00

 Recently, I migrated a huge Evernote database that had almost 15,000 notes into Obsidian, taking weeks to complete. Ultimately, what I realized was that most of what I was keeping was functionally obsolete. I now only have 3-5 notes that I access daily, and seldom search for things. Much of hoarding is based on the idea that at some point we will need something and find it easily. It's a

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-42311774114548889952026-06-15T06:43:41.734-05:002026-06-15T06:50:03.504-05:00

  I'm a quirky musical artist because my background is in visual art and writing. In my tweens, I was writing plays and wanted to be an architect. I would design houses and make models out of shoe boxes, including the landscape design. Doing that and playing with Legos informed my creative style, which is essentially a combinatory construction of things in blocks–which is the way I work

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-33186288917964464742026-06-11T05:09:16.944-05:002026-06-11T05:11:36.638-05:00

 On the recent book about David Bowie's spiritual life, David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God.My biggest takeaway is more of a reflection of my own life, right around the Outside-Earthling period (1995-1996), when I started to prefer more of an edgy approach over melodic pop songwriting. I didn't have any spiritual interests then and was more of a postmodernist atheist artist. I

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-73693377710658579802026-05-27T07:05:29.498-05:002026-05-27T07:05:29.498-05:00

 For the past 5 years I’ve been reading about the mythic nature of AI, and now it’s creating its own myths that I have little interest in, even though it was of deeper interest around Ancient AI (2017). A friend said it’s like all cultural memes, like the cabbage-patch dolls, etc., but it’s a creepy doll, like Elon Musk. I’ve been interested in AI for some time—since the mid 90s when I

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-32467858537795774962026-05-25T07:53:24.336-05:002026-05-25T07:54:56.206-05:00

  Anything popular (or populist) requires a natural piquancy and resonance. Once that starts to fall apart, so does the cult. Take a popular band, like Angine de Poitrine is at the moment: Once they start to deviate from what the fans expect, they might start to fade out. It will be interesting to follow their creative path. If they follow Bowie's Ziggy path, the character will die

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-81289173961488081042026-05-17T19:29:58.558-05:002026-05-17T19:29:58.558-05:00

 Eclecticism is different in the age of AI. When I generate music, I can experiment with a wide number of genres, then curate the results. When I listen back to them, I'm not necessarily making any value judgments based on the genre itself, or what I would write or record; I'm essentially a lyricist, producer, and sometimes art director, and then I'm the listener with wildly eclectic tastes.

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-25270489274390668132026-05-05T07:59:48.785-05:002026-05-05T07:59:48.785-05:00

 This is a passage from the book The Story of Stories where I’m swapping our “story” for “song” as a corollary between stories and song lyrics. I don’t think lyrics have to tell stories, but rather suggest them. Even if the songwriter explains what it’s about, listeners will find different stories which might be triggered by words, lines, or couplets. I like them to be about something if

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-79391021208738178922026-05-03T07:13:17.570-05:002026-05-03T07:13:17.570-05:00

 To me, using AI in music is essentially a very conceptual thing, and is an extension of conceptual art—not mainstream. Music itself is a conceptual art even if you’re not doing conceptual work. I just read an article about the Endel and Plastikman collaboration. Basically what they’re doing are remixes but they’re running them through neural networks and using Alexa Skills, which is

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-47338690481322953162026-04-29T20:39:22.956-05:002026-04-29T20:39:22.957-05:00

 All my musings on AI in April 2026. It's a hot topic at the moment.AI music is where iPhone photography was in 2010: everyone started doing it. I can’t imagine where it will be in a decade. I’ve heard people say they like that they can create music they want to listen to, which has the effect of listening to music more, a nice diversion from the horror of the news--or watching in general.&

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-76043749708569660012026-04-19T07:05:00.005-05:002026-04-19T07:08:06.268-05:00

 AI music has renewed my interest in writing lyrics. I started writing lyrics around 1990, up until 1999 when I decided I didn't want to write songs anymore and only wrote instrumentals and ambient music. Now I'm continuously writing lyrics in the flow of other writing, capturing lines that have a musical quality. I may start with a blog post,  reduce it to a poem, then reduce it to a

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-49539961261688117252026-04-12T09:53:00.001-05:002026-04-12T09:53:15.764-05:00

 Merz 601 by KURT SCHWITTERS (1923)For the past few months I've been pulling text fragments out of various places. mostly from my diary, which I can use for lyrics. It's an interesting metaphor for our time where we have to stitch together a day based on fragments. Each bit of content we interact with gets immediately sliced into fragments. Imagine you're working on a piece that is so

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-74263685737959609892026-04-05T06:31:00.003-05:002026-04-05T06:48:56.504-05:00

 It's interesting to reflect on what I'm doing now with AI compared to what I used to do. I've kept a lyric journal since around 1990, and a lyric could take months or years. Now it's almost too easy to write songs. The nice side effect is that we can listen to music during the writing process, not unlike having a TTS voice read something back to you--which is very helpful in finding the "

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-33841591580807823132026-03-23T22:45:00.007-05:002026-03-24T08:52:42.373-05:00

 AI music creates an absurd situation for artists and musicians. The longer you've been using it, the more you've gotten used to using it, and it's in the flow of your creative activities. But since we don't have control over the variables in manual art making, we are slaves to whatever options are available. The results are pretty interesting, and I like using AI music generators as I can

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3167021.post-20624600713808061722026-03-22T17:01:02.458-05:002026-03-22T17:03:54.907-05:00

 A couple years ago I created a piece titled Words Face the Wall. It’s a piece that couldn’t be just digital. It needs the wall in order for it to make sense, so it’s self-referential in that way. It’s a work that can be transferred to a virtual space to suggest that the work is placed in some kind of a context. Right now we’re not paying attention to the context in which digital artwork is

Lee Barryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13037728772984629088noreply@blogger.com0