The Lifehouse Method (2007 - 2008)

2007 - 2008

dead uk

pete townshend wrote lifehouse in 1971 as a story about music generated from a person's own data, and the who could not build it because the machines did not exist yet. in april 2007 he put those machines on a website with the composer lawrence ball and the developer dave snowdon, and about 10,500 people sat for a musical portrait assembled out of what they typed in. it ran fifteen months. the site closed in july 2008, the concert everyone had been promised never happened, and the only public trace is an album lawrence ball made from the material in 2012.

» see lifehouse-method.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 1971 Pete Townshend wrote a science fiction story in which a person's own details were fed into a machine and came back out as music belonging to nobody else. to be honest. The Who could not make the album. for some reason. The idea needed computers that did not exist. the wreckage of the attempt became Who's Next, a record people still play without knowing what it was salvaged from.

Thirty six years later the computers existed. On 25 April 2007 lifehouse-method.com opened, built by Townshend with the composer Lawrence Ball and the software developer Dave Snowdon. You registered, answered a set of questions about yourself. for some reason. the system composed a piece of music out of what you had given it. The word they used for the output was portrait, the person was the sitter, borrowed straight from painting.

i pretty much was not paying attention by then, but anyway, around 10,500 people sat for one. in those days. in fairness, it ran about fifteen months and closed in July '08, with the concert of selected portraits never arranged and no announcement worth calling an announcement.

I was not a Who listener and I never sat for a portrait. either way. What pulls me toward this one is the gap in the middle of it. A musician waited thirty six years for the machine his idea required and then got it. for some reason. He ran the experiment on ten thousand strangers and switched it off after a year. Most people who wait that long for a technology do not turn it off when it finally shows up.

~ the rap sheet ~

Born	25 april 2007, at lifehouse-method.com
Peak	about 10,500 musical portraits generated
Killed	july 2008
Lifespan	fifteen months
Made by	Pete Townshend, with Lawrence Ball and Dave Snowdon
Killed by	an experiment that had already answered its own question

~ how it worked ~

i saw this from a distance, mostly. anyway. Ball wrote the musical logic and Snowdon built the software that ran it. The sitter's answers were mapped onto musical parameters and rendered into a piece nobody else would ever receive, generated rather than picked from a library, which in 2007 was an unusual claim for a website to make. back then. It predates the current generation of machine-made music by about fifteen years and shares almost none of its architecture, because there was no model inside it. There were rules, written by a composer, applied to data.

this part you had to be in the US for, and i was not. Townshend's own framing was that these were real portraits and not novelties, the musical equivalent of sitting for a painter. Whether the output earned that description is something the people who have heard the files still argue about. for some reason. most of the files were never public in the first place.

~ the day it died ~

this part i was not really around for, but anyway, nothing dramatic ended it. The site closed in July '08. It was run by Townshend's own company rather than by anybody carrying a growth target. it could just stop once the experiment had produced enough material to work with (name escapes me). either way. The gathering where sitters would hear their portraits performed never happened, and it still has not.

The material did survive in one form. In January 2012 Lawrence Ball released Method Music through Navona Records, compositions worked up with Townshend out of what the system had generated. by then. That is the only public output of the whole project: one album made from ten thousand private ones (dont quote me on that). The portraits themselves went wherever unshared files go, which is nowhere you can visit.

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