In June 2014 artist-musician Grey Gersten (a.k.a. Eternal Lips) exhibited Custom Melodies — an interactive music exhibition in which participants collaborated with the artist to create custom songs at Mmuseumm in New York City. During the 12 night exhibition, Gersten spontaneously wrote, performed and recorded over 110 biographical songs creating roughly 7 hours of new music.

Participants filled out a “Custom Song Application” which featured questions about lifestyle habits, reoccurring dreams, childhood memories and included designated areas for a band name, song title, cover art and self portraits. Once their application was completed, participants were taken inside the Custom Melodies song factory for a private 20 minute appointment during which Gersten — surrounded by myriad instruments — wrote, performed and recorded their custom song live in one unedited take onto a lo-fi handheld recording device.

Custom Melodies was featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Gizmodo, Interview Magazine and other publications. Time Out NY ranked Custom Melodies #1 on its Things To Do List declaring “It’s safe to say that there hasn’t been anything like this event in…well…ever." Mmuseumm Co-founder Alex Kalman was the creative director of Custom Melodies and co-produced the exhibition with Gersten. “Each song is a musical portrait of an individual" says Gersten. "It’s their actual voice - singing about their life. The lyrics are drawn verbatim from their stories and dreams. It’s like autobiographical karaoke.”

Gersten's lo-fi unedited handheld recordings give listeners an intimate fly on the wall perspective of each song’s creation. The songs are enveloped by traffic sirens, car alarms, motorcycle roars, and conversation fragments of tourists and drifters passing by Mmuseumm’s unenclosed location in Cortlandt Alley, New York City. “I love these field recordings because they capture a moment" says Gersten. "Listening to a person sing in their actual environment deepens your understanding of their reality, it adds an immediacy to the story or feeling being shared."

In Fall 2015 Gersten launched custommelodies.com, an interactive multi-media web art piece that allows users to explore the music, art, and writings created at the Custom Melodies exhibition. The website’s unique user interface was conceived by Gersten who worked with designer Matt Goodrich and programmer Julia Wallin to construct the site. Graphic Artist Nicole Ginelli’s ambient backdrops give the website a mesmerizing depth.

Gersten plans to curate other artists and musicians involvement in the project and exhibit Custom Melodies internationally and at prisons in the United States. “Custom Melodies is an open platform, hopefully it inspires us to speak and listen to each other in new ways. The more voices we involve, the broader our consciousness will become,” says Gersten. “There are funny songs, boring songs, optimistic songs, existential songs, love songs, food songs, nostalgic songs, preachy songs…these songs are like pieces of a mosaic, if we look at all of the them together as a whole maybe they illuminate something about the human condition.”

Custom Melodies is dedicated to Shahzad Ismaily