(316) 247-0421: Leave a Voicemail, Get a Soundtrack to Your Thoughts
Posted by Gabriella_Levine on Wednesday, Aug 25, 2010
“Thanks for calling into One Hello World. Leave us a story so we can write you some music.”
That’s the voicemail recording played when you dial up One Hello World. Then it’s up to you to tell a story, or say anything you want, to the voicemail.
One Hello World, is a project run by a guy in Wichita, Kansas, a trained pianist with a day job in web services. His tumblr site describes it as a “collection of voicemail set to music”. A caller simply leaves a message, and, using his laptop and his keyboard, he writes music behind the narrative.
One Hello World, (as he calls himself), conceived this project, when he was recording music one day, and thought, “What would make this track complete is to have random people discussing their thoughts on happiness.” He couldn’t afford gathering people in his studio, so he setup a Google Voice account and posted a request on his social network site for friends to call up.
“I was surprised by the large response and how candidly the callers spoke. Later I posted the track online and it was so well received that I decided to post the phone number on tumblr, with the promise that I would write music to the voicemails I receive, just to see who would call in. Almost immediately, there were random people from all parts of the world leaving deeply personal voicemails about life, love lost, and other perspectives on the human experience”.
A few days after you leave a message (or if your story is more than three minutes and you get cut off, you can leave multiple messages), your soundtrack will be posted on the website. The soundtrack ends up being a musical composition, layered with your narrative, rendering your story into a brief multi-sensory journey. The overall tone generally ends up whimsical, nostalgic, joyful, or musing. Sometimes your narrative is combined with others’ narratives, becoming quite layered and complex.
For example, Happiness, which was posted last week, sounds like a compilation of about 5 peoples’ voicemails. Above a steady, low bass line are the voices of people sincerely describing what happiness is to each:
Happiness is: “never putting yourself or others down”; or
“total financial autonomy”; or
“a gin and tonic, some live jazz music and a fine, fine unique friend”.
Then the melody rises to the foreground as the composition becomes layered with multiple voices and narratives.
Another composition, entitled He’s my friend and that’s ok is a whimsical and overcast soundtrack, in which one boy professes his love for a friend that is no more than a friend. “I guess this is just kind of my way of telling him I think he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
One of my favorites is a composition, entitled “I really should cut back on the drugs”. At the end of the eerie melody, the narrator concludes, “I really should cut back on the drugs, but it’s just kinda too much fun”.
One caller just called in from France just to say, I’m in love!.
As One Hello World grows, the creator says that he hopes to “Feature snapshots of the human experience from every part of the world. I know that’s a lofty goal and it will take some time to get there, but I believe in the power of the internet and music to connect us all”.
In the future, he also hopes to create live performances.
One Hello World is a cool, small-scale, crowd-sourced musical narrative project. Call up and leave him a voicemail: (316) 247-0421
Read more on Motherboard about collective story-telling and the 1-bit symphony.
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