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My Musical Portrait |
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Pete Townshend, the enigmatic guitarist from legendary rock band The Who, has come out with a new online music making project that has been years in the making. He calls it The Lifehouse Method. The idea is to allow users to "sit" for three musical portraits and create music from their uploaded "profiles," essentially an online version of the idea he has been developing since 1969.
Lifehouse was originally conceived as a collaborative concert project. Using data derived from the personalities of those in the audience, Townshend would program his synthesizers accordingly, ultimately merging all of an audience's biographical data into one "universal chord." If everything went correctly, the vibration would be so pure that people would reach enlightenment on the spot.
The devil, of course, was in the details. Townshend nearly drove himself crazy trying to accomplish his mystic goal. The Lifehouse project was to be a movie created from concert footage interwoven with plot. The Who were to play for a regular audience every night and the band would develop the music as the concerts evolved, with the help of the audience. Eventually, when things began to take shape, the concerts would be filmed and a storyline created around them. Unfortunately, scheduling conflicts made nightly concerts impossible and Pete had a lot of trouble communicating the ideas behind the project to his fellow band members. The project was ultimately discarded, though Townshend has been trying to complete the movie/album ever since.
The new Lifehouse Method seems to be an outgrowth of this original idea. Users sign up and sit for a musical portrait. To do so, they upload or record short audio files of their voice, a sound they like, a rhythm that appeals to them, and a picture that represents them. Sitting for a musical portrait is relatively painless, it's free, and at the end "your music" appears, ready to play.
So how does it sound? Well, I sat for a musical portrait and…it sound interesting actually!
For the first step I recorded myself saying, "My name is Jason, and I am very interested in making music using the Lifehouse Method." Then, for the second step I uploaded this picture of myself, taken a couple years ago.
Next, I uploaded the beginning 10 seconds or so of this great track by RZA called "Grits".
Lastly, I recorded a short hip hop rhythm I tapped out on my desk.
What came out sounded nothing like what I put in, but that's the point really. The system apparently uses the material you give it as a guide to your personality and creates music around that. My music had lots of strings and was kind of melancholy and rigid, with bursts of percussion, horns, and basses. The tempo and rhythm evolved as time passed, creating a soothing background. I actually kind of liked it! Here it is, hear it for yourself:
Pretty neat right? I thought so. So neat in fact that I tried it again, putting a little more thought into my input this time.
For my second sitting I recorded myself speaking the opening to W.B. Yeat's "The Second Coming":
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
Then I uploaded a short clip of a song I wrote and recorded entitled "His Last Words." Check out the full song below:
I uploaded a rhythm I beat out on my acoustic guitar during a break between songs that I recorded in the Wine Poetry album Six Pillars. Here's that clip:
And I uploaded this picture I took of a huge street festival in Japan, one of my personal favorites:
Using all these inputs the Lifehouse Method again gave me my music second portrait. Did using more meaningful audio and imagery result in a more meaningful portrait? I think so. It certainly was more upbeat to say the least, with more interesting instrumentation and some cool surprise turns in the music about 1/3 of the way through. But you tell me! What do you think of Portrait #2?
There you have it folks, a portrait of J-Ro, in music, as he is today. I'm not sure what this means for art and musical talent, and I'm not positive any of these portraits could be called "good music," but that doesn't really matter. Townshend says he will be selecting portraits he finds interesting for further elaboration by composers and electronic musicians, and I can certainly see some of the themes I've created being elaborated into larger works. But overall, this is just a lot of fun, and the results are actually pretty good.
What do you think of my portraits? If you decide to sit for your own portrait, please post a link in the comments to the resulting audio track so we all can check it out!
The music you created are interesting, certainly different from any of mine. I put six of mine on my vox blog, hopefully, I will be able to add all 40. The developer of the Lifehouse Method is there too but he's too busy to add more of his portraits and he's got loads more cool tunes than I do