Experience Music Project--Seattle's Multimedia Rock'n'Roll Museum

An audio-oriented tour
of Seattle’s latest wonder

Milestones Gallery
(click image for larger view).

Once upon a time, in the Queen Anne section of Seattle, there was a Flintstone-esque, stucco-encrusted building which the locals referred to as “The Blob.” It housed a decent enough Greek restaurant, but the main attraction was the innovative, if not cartoonish, melted pudding structure. Alas, the restaurant closed in the mid-’90s, and the building was demolished soon thereafter. Yet another of Seattle’s wonderful little oddities was lost forever.

The Experience Music Project Live Web site (click image for larger view).

Then, in June of 1997, the ground swelled again, and out from the great maw of Mother Earth was born a second, grander, shinier and perhaps more appealing “blob,” a mere 10 blocks from the original, plainer blob’s former location. “What the hell is that?” someone asked on the bus. “That’s the new Jimi Hendrix Museum,” someone else replied. Then, silence. That was three years ago.

Now, at long last, Seattle boasts a brand new oddity—the Experience Music Project (EMP). Within 35,000 square feet of neo-modern sculpted architecture at the base of one of Seattle’s most recognized and celebrated landmarks, the Space Needle, this blob forgoes dolmas and flaming cheeses to serve up a healthy dose of good ol’ rock ’n’ roll. EMP’s mission statement reads, “EMP celebrates and explores creativity and innovation as expressed through American popular music and exemplified by rock ’n’ roll,” and the contents within this odd structure bear this intent.

The second floor balcony, overlooking the lobby and store
(click for larger view).

EMP is the brainchild of Microsoft co-founder (and musician) Paul Allen and Jody Allen Patton. Frank O. Gehry and Associates, of Santa Monica, Calif., designed the building, which is composed of formed steel 85 feet high at its highest point, 210 feet wide and 360 feet long with 140,000 square feet of floor space. To fill this vast amount of space, EMP has amassed over 80,000 rock ’n’ roll artifacts that span a range from one of the first electric guitars to handwritten song lyrics to historical pieces of recording equipment. I am told there isn’t a single right angle within the structure. Coming from the firm that designed similarly bizarre-looking, but strangely beautiful, art museums in Malibu and Bilbao, Spain, this is not too surprising.

Greeting the visitor at EMP’s entrance is—what else?—loud rock music, which creates the feeling of attending an already-in-progress concert. After purchasing our entrance tickets ($20), we proceeded to the soul of the building, appropriately named The Sky Church. Magnificent! An oval room spanned by 85-foot video screens that continuously project MPEG-2 video with surround sound, the atmosphere is completed by an automated light show of grand proportions. The scene was so spectacular I forgot I was there only to pick up my Museum Exhibit Guide (MEG). This is the visitor’s first real glimpse at the intricate network of digital multimedia servers EMP uses. The entire museum currently uses 85 AV outputs, streaming 15-mbits/sec video and 26 channels of audio, feeding 75 speakers for a stunning surround sound experience. At the very heart of this network are broadcast-quality audio and video servers, all of which are PC-based systems containing hours of high-quality video and real-time MPEG-2 encoding capabilities. These servers digitally transmit AES audio and 601 video to the entire EMP cable infrastructure.

Reprinted with permission from

[an error occurred while processing this directive]