The Lifehouse Method

The Lifehouse Method was an Internet site where applicants could sit for an electronic musical portrait made up from data they enter into the website. This website was the result of a collaboration between The Who's principal songwriter and composer Pete Townshend, composer Lawrence Ball and software developer Dave Snowdon. The website was operated by Eel Pie Recording Production, Limited, a company set up in 1970 by Pete Townshend.

The Lifehouse Method grew out of Pete Townshend's ground-breaking 1971 futuristic composition Lifehouse. Although Townshend originally intended Lifehouse as a multi-media, audience-participation musical production to follow The Who's Tommy, difficulties in funding and implementing the project led to its release as The Who's highly successful album Who's Next instead. Although some of the key Lifehouse songs were left off Who's Next, the basic concept of the opus is still recognizable within the album.

In Lifehouse Townshend predicted a future wherein the population was forced inside by heavy pollution and connected in their homes to an Internet-like "Grid" through which media moguls provided programmed entertainment. Rebels escaped this situation and gathered together to perform a live musical concert which generated a nirvana like state of universal unity.

Townshend hoped to link the audience in a way that would reflect the personalities of the audience members. To do this, he adapted VCS3 and ARP synthesizers and a quadraphonic PA to create a machine capable of generating and combining personal music themes written from computerized biographical data. He expected these thematic components would merge to form a "One Note" or "universal chord" representing the audience, and by extrapolation, all of humanity.

Although the original project proved too ambitious for the technology available in 1971, Townshend revisited the Lifehouse concept in The Who's album Who Are You and in his radio play and recording Psychoderelict. He continued discussion of these themes in his later opus The Boy Who Heard Music.

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