The Making of Listen to the Light, a location-aware album for Central Park by Bluebrain.
Bluebrain’s Central Park (Listen to the Light) is the second in a series of “location-aware” musical compositions designed to be heard at specific sights around the world. Central Park (Listen to the Light) discards the passive listening experience and instead invites listeners to engage with their environment. The music changes and evolves based on the user’s location within Central Park in New York City.
To create the app, Bluebrain and contributing musicians composed a multitude of distinct musical segments, each of which corresponds with a designated geographic zone in the park. As the user traverses these zones, Central Park (Listen to the Light) tracks their location via the iPhone’s built-in GPS capabilities; the melody and rhythm of the music varies in accordance with the user’s path.
Though the sequencing of Central Park (Listen to the Light) changes depending on the user’s route and pace, the individual compositions remain as permanent as tracks on an LP: a user standing twenty feet south of the Alice in Wonderland Sculpture can return to the same spot a week, month or year later to hear the same music.
