The Lifehouse Method

» 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. The Who could not make the album. The idea needed computers that did not exist, and 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, and 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.

Around 10,500 people sat for one. It ran about fifteen months and closed in July 2008, 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. 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. 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 ~

~ how it worked ~

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. 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.

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, and most of the files were never public in the first place.

~ the day it died ~

Nothing dramatic ended it. The site closed in July 2008. It was run by Townshend's own company rather than by anybody carrying a growth target, so it could simply stop once the experiment had produced enough material to work with. 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. That is the only public output of the whole project: one album made from ten thousand private ones. The portraits themselves went wherever unshared files go, which is nowhere you can visit.

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