As I was doing this I was taking screen grabs of bits that I really liked. This isn't a service. A way to see & hear the inputs used to create a piece of music and to see a representation of how lifehouse-method.com saw those same inputs (ie. He applied comparable levels of sound quality to my album to those he is used to, which stretched my impatience to complete the work. I don't know.". We have talked about how delightful it would be, how extraordinary it would be, and again it’s something modern computers allow us to do, which is to take this data that we have - remember data is musical data - we can print sheet music really quite easily, and immediately put that sheet music in front of skilled musicians, and they can play it. We could hire an orchestra and churn this music out, and instead of hearing it played by synthesizers, you could hear it played by musicians. The Lifehouse Method was a software system that Pete Townshend launched in 2007, designed to generate unique pieces of music processed from various personal data that a user input into the website interface. "I'm introducing today something called The Method, which is software, produced by Lawrence Ball, composer, and Dave Snowden, who is a software engineer. Listen free to Pete Townshend – Lifehouse Chronicles (Teenage Wasteland, Goin' Mobile and more). Pete explored this idea further in "The Boy Who Heard Music", an internet novella that was published on his blog in 2005. The truth was all wrapped up in music and film-biz politics. So, a lot of the arty farty ideas that I had at art school started to come into my thesis as a composer, and I was accused very, very often in the world of rock and roll of being pretentious. How did you go about linking the song segments together? To date, the Lifehouse Method concert for sitters to gather and celebrate a performance of their portraits has not yet taken place. I was a big fan of Terry Riley, and in the 70's used Terry Riley and the Indian teacher Meher Baba for one of my first experiments in this particular process. Teenage Wateland, not Baba O' Riley. Each CD is punctuated with cues, which approximate to every 6 pages in the playscript. It was less obvious than the faces and more intriguing. "So simply, you go to a website, you put in some data, you get some music out. The Meher Baba piece however on my album was elaborated by Pete as "Fragments" on the Who's album Endless Wire. I met Lawrence when I was doing the final artwork for Endless Wire and he showed me what the Visual Harmony software, which he and Dave Snowdon had developed, could do. I of course, in 2003-2007, used MIDI. Pete will, in some cases, involve himself more deeply with participants, and develop lyrics or poetry to complement certain pieces of music. 78 tracks (422:50). Vicarious living. In 1999, Pete Townshend released the Lifehouse Chronicles box set. Baba O'Riley's paradiddle was made with a Lowrie organ, and the final loop taken from a longer "generation session" of sounds. LIFEHOUSE CHRONICLES, available exclusively on Pete Townshend's e-commerce site, is an expansive documentation of the composer's lost dream child, "Lifehouse". All that's happening here is this data is being played by electronic instruments. The Genelec speakers were chosen because they were inherently fairly colourless (the ‘colour’ is a slight ‘honk or bark’ that most speakers have, if you switch from any one pair of speakers to another pair, you will hear the difference). I approached him about funding Planet Tree Music Festival in 1998, when I featured a Terry Riley solo concert, which he did do. How did you go about producing the Method album? This can be processed to give true stereo or 5.1 surround sound, depending on your needs. If given the opportunity, would you like to expand on the features some day? Welcome back. It's a bit of a cheat. As a Who fan , I have always enjoyed the music Pete creates. What all was involved in utilizing Harmonic Mathematics as a basis for your designs? Again, intriguing stuff. The film project stalled, but the legendary rock album Who’s Next was acclaimed by many as The Who’s finest. These parameters were fed to a custom written composition engine which generated MIDI data. The Lifehouse Chronicles is a 6 CD box set released in 2000 by Pete Townshend, and only made available through his website. Was there anything more that you planned to implement, such as visual output, that you were unable to do? The album was a huge success. Original Lifehouse story by Pete Townshend Adapted for radio by Jeff Young Simon & Schuster Pocket Books. See my youtube video helix for a good visual representation of HM. How different was this project from previous artwork that you have done for Pete and The Who? But the idea probably germinated many, many years before. I developed, out of the base of computer filmmaker John Whitney's "Differential Dynamics", and with the help of friends and students, a new kind of mathematics that generates beautiful patterns that dissolve and recrystallise continually. Working out how to generate pleasing music from the inputs provided by the "sitters" (as Pete called people using the software). It doesn’t exist, except as a means of connecting people, and feeding them.’ ‘They would literally start to travel towards each other.’ ‘What, physically you mean? In the first draft of the play was a fictional scene that, at the time, seemed almost inconceivable in reality. ‘I’ve been thinking. He has created a new medium Speak-Sing-Play where poetry is heard spoken, sung, and accompanied simultaneously. I had done this about three times and was quite intrigued by it all. After Xerox, he co-founded Snowtiger Design, a small web/software consultancy, where he put a decade worth of personal experience in professional software development to work for his clients. How did you come to be involved with creating the artwork for The Method? "Who's Next" being a particular favorite. The sound in the room was captured with a single microphone. I recently wrote a proposal to a friend of mine who owns a computer company that might have agreed to sponsor some events of this kind. of the various artists mentioned in the lyrics flying up through the pillars and down the steps. I have always had a fondness for maelstroms, blizzards and hurricanes where you see people's possessions hurtling through the air. You can go "out there" with a story if you "in there" with your mind. But we need a method. Now with cloud computing it would be practical to dynamically adapt the number of servers used to run the site according to how busy the site was - this would make it far more cost effective to run the Lifehouse Method software today than it was back in 2007. We are capable today of making a reality of what once seemed like a metaphysical brainstorm.’ ‘His critics called it a brain-fart,’ said Josh. So I got together with Roger Powell, who played with Todd Rundgren, a guy called Tim Souster, who became the composer in residence at Cambridge University, who introduced me to Stockhausen and a few other high brows in modern music, and people from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. My second favourite concept was used in the digital booklet and was also used for the launch invite. Copyright of Eel Pie Publishing and Pete Townshend (2000). 14 09 Imaginary Sitters: Sitter No. In 2005 there were a reasonable amount of ‘General Midi’ standard software sound modules that could have been used, but I think the general consensus was that they sounded a bit ‘too’ standardised. He listened to everything, and enthused greatly, clearly loved what I was doing. Pete Townshend - NME - August 21, 1971. I had a wealth of material that I had gathered from the Visual Harmony software and I took some of that as my starting-off point. This is rather more like saying, ‘I've got this beautiful golden retriever, tell me the truth.’ How would you divine that? She burst into laughter. "Now the reason I did this simply was because I am a musician. I am one of a number of participants in this process. … ‘I need a rhythm for you,’ the computer program continued to run. All music written by Pete Townshend. For more information about Richard Evans and to view his impressive artwork, please visit rdevans.com. Lifehouse was the story that Pete wanted to tell with the music. Threshold Computers make buying and working with computers easier for people. I should think the only brief that I got was from Lawrence in that he wanted the album cover to reflect what the music within was all about. "I have always hoped that the Lifehouse concert referred to in this play can happen in reality. Find information about "Lifehouse" listen to "Lifehouse" on AllMusic AllMusic. I dropped the Lifehouse bit. ‘Very good.’… Victoria’s bleached-modern bedroom was filled with sound, generated by her interaction with the BBZee computer that Leila with Damoo’s help had programmed to allow Method subscribers to jack into the Grid. CD 1: The Lifehouse Demos … Attendance at this concert is guaranteed and free to every purchaser of the ‘Method’ package whether they take part in the experiment or not. 12 07 Imaginary Sitters: Sitter No. I said yes immediately. This meant that we could not directly use the sounds and rhythms that people submitted and instead had to process the files and extract information about the sort of sound, rhythm and image a person had submitted. Not specific techniques as such, but from my side of things the project was very reliant on working out and honing processes to make repetitive tasks as painless and speedy as possible with large quantities of data. Lawrence Ball presented his portraiture system to the press, and gave a demonstration using John Pidgeon as the test sitter. Website produced by Carrie Pratt © 2012-2020 CONTACT HOME, Reason - an integrated sequencer/synthesizer, meditationalmusic.net/blog/category/methodmusic/, http://meditationalmusic.net/blog/the-relationship-of-the-album-method-music-and-the-lifehouse-method-portraiture-to-my-1984-series-of-composition-called-number-rays. So, if Coca Cola decide to use it for their next commercial, you might get rich! I had my friend and collaborator Dave Snowdon involved although he took time to settle his role in, and approach to, the project. The Soundfield microphone uses capsules fixed in a very precise tetrahedral shape that, when processed accordingly, gives a very accurate reproduction of the sound in a room. Thus I move quickly onto the reality. ‘It was a premature vision. His friendship with Hughes led to Townshend's musical interpretation of Hughes's children's story The Iron Man, six years later, as The Iron Man: The Musical by Pete Townshend, released in 1989. No wonder I went for a simpler design for Method Music! Basically once the software is up and running it's just one mass of swirling shapes, blocks, liquid blobs, and discs flying through the blackness of space – sort of like a giant sophisticated lava lamp being operated by some crazed mad man on a trip! With the software you can steer your path through these shapes and turn and reverse and see them from a completely different angle. An opportunity to realign with Eelpie came about, and Myles currently runs the barge studio in London for Eelpie and continues to work on various projects as they come up, including the demo and live bootleg work on the 2013 Tommy deluxe box-set. Pete Townshend (born Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend), is an award-winning English rock guitarist, singer, songwriter, composer, and writer. With an experimental project like this, it usually feels like one technical challenge after another - once one is solved, another crops up. You just have to sit and keep still. We can elaborate the information that is produced in the first pass on the computer. Pete Townshend. Pete Townshend and Heavy Metal Magazine are teaming up to produce a graphic novel of Lifehouse, which is slated to be published in July 2020. So give it a few tries and see how you get along. Townshend has written several scripts spanning the breadth of his career, including numerous drafts of his elusive Lifehouse project, the last of which, co-written with radio playwright Jeff Young, was published in 1999. 903 Imaginary Sitters: Sitter No. While I can say nothing specific regarding those potentialities (or eventualities), the fact remains that Lifehouse, despite my best attempts, is a book that simply will not let itself be closed. With this dramatic script and lyrics, Townshend brilliantly explores the. We also felt that the note data generated by the Method software, often very pacey and dense, sometimes sounded a bit cloudy or mushy. What would they share musically, and how would they produce the music that they shared? [laughs] The composer is king in this respect. In other words, giving certain sitters a chance to come back and have another go. We didn't make use of random values, as I recall everything was decided based on the data generated from the inputs provided by the sitter. Then when I had completed an album's worth of material, he suggested we set about really shining up the sound big time. In 2000, he decided to make a decent production of the songs. The white psychedelic doves or 'angels', incidentally, came from a part of Pete's original working script and the story boards for The Boy Who Heard Music – from which came the mini-opera Wire & Glass (originally titled The Glass Household). I don't quite know why, but I suddenly had this vision of the future of computers. We are all equal, and what comes out at the end is hopefully an authentic reflection or portrait of the data that you put in. However, it's an important one. I believe that that perfect music, that Perfect Music, will reflect God.’ The videotape sputtered. What was it like to work with Pete on something as technically and creatively innovative as this project? I believe this could be a fucking nightmare.’ The trio laughed at the man on their video screen. So, I like to think of it as musical DNA. The music will belong in three equal shares to me, to Glass Household, and divided among the various agencies that provide the Grid. It might sound terrible, it might sound beautiful. He made many suggestions, resulting in my re-recording the album the equivalent of three times: first to get better samples and sound, then to use a midi-controlled pianola in his home studio for all the piano parts, then to rerecord all the drum parts with partially pitched tones to add a melodic flavour to all the drumkit sounds, then to putting each instrument through a separate high quality monitor speaker to help the sounds really speak distinctly in the studio space, then he removed the stage at Oceanic as it sounded too boxy, and then Myles and I swung some of the monitors as pendulums to give a great phasing effect. The code, when entered, will bring up a special data-entry page which will lead the user through a process that produces a one-off, unique piece of music, that contains a unique lyric generated by lyric motifs written by me. LIFEHOUSE CHRONICLES, available exclusively on Pete Townshend's e-commerce site, is an expansive documentation of the composer's lost dream child, "Lifehouse". For each Portrait we drew a ‘map’ of where each instrument would be placed if we were working with a real group, and sent the sound to the corresponding speaker set up on the studio floor. Was there a random factor as to which order these segments were placed, or was it specific based on the input? This was to give a natural coherent feel to the sound in the room, coming out of the speakers. For more information about Lawrence and the work he did on the Method project, please visit his blog at meditationalmusic.net/blog/category/methodmusic/. I remember asking him about when he did his compositions why he used loads of different speakers, and he said it was to create what you get with an orchestra, which is for example if you all began to sing, you actually have a space which is not just stereo, it's a field of sound. In a way, you'll all be familiar with this as journalists, this is the editorial process. When Oceanic closed its doors in 2007, Myles set up his own small studio in East London. Album. On a date (yet to be set) in the future, an event will be held at which many of the pieces of music will be heard in public for the first time. Did you receive any particular brief from Pete or Lawrence for this? Lifehouse will be published in July 2020, as a 150-page graphic novel based on Pete Townshend's screenplay and music, written and drawn by Little Nemo's James Harvey, set in a … People weren’t linked the way they are today. The unit played only a few gigs, but one was videotaped and recorded, resulting in the 1986 album Pete Townshend's Deep End Live! I listened to the whole thing, which is a 5 minute piece, and I picked pieces, chunks of it. Were you able to incorporate any of the concepts of the original system into your new one in order to recreate a similar soundscape? "The idea of Lifehouse originally centred on an idea about a self-sufficient drop-out family group farming in a remote part of Scotland who decide to return South to investigate rumours of a subversive concert event that promises to shake and wake up an apathetic fearful British society. If you DO put a nice chunky, familiar drum pattern under any of the Portraits, you almost always get a really useable backing track. But it wasn't so much a pretentiousness, but a hope in a sense that one day we would get to this place. Dave Snowdon, with this input, developed a programme in 1995 called Visual Harmony, which embodies and further extends this work in the graphics area. New Releases. That came later [laughs], but it was a huge crash for me. It hasn't worked out quite as I imagined of course, but I had a vision. It might sound like the sea, it might sound like a plane going by, it might sound like the gentle undulations of the ocean. ‘Good,’ said the computer. 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