Posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2015 by Will Hagle
Lincoln’s Music Selfie Experiment lets you celebrate your individuality by turning your selfie into sound, as personal and unique as your own thumbprint.
The Music Selfie Experiment is a site built by the Lincoln Motor Company. Although it’s technically a promotional campaign for a luxury automobile company, the site has basically nothing to do with cars. It does, however, have everything to do with selfies. The experiment is an interesting one, as it uses facial recognition features to turn photographs of people’s heads into distinct musical sound. The site uses your computer’s camera to take a picture of your face, which it analyzes and turns into unique data points. Each of those points corresponds with a song that plays, and you can manipulate the mix by making adjustments in real time.
Each picture on the Music Selfie Experiment has a different sound but uses the same elements. One section of the face — the nose, for instance, controls percussion. Another controls bass. Another controls ambience, and so on. It’s not exactly clear how The Music Selfie works, but it’s cool that it does. In addition to allowing you to create and share your own selfie, the site also lets you explore a gallery of other users. It is interesting to see how slight variations in facial features cause obvious differences in the outcomes of the songs. It’s a reminder that everyone really is unique. The experiment takes just a few minutes to complete, and it’s entertaining to see how your own selfie turns out.
