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across Sheep Meadow you hear a pastoral piano the
me with a bubbling undercurrent of electronic arpe
ggios.
The themes layer over one another, growing in volu
me as you approach certain points on the map and f
ading out as you move away. It’s a musical Venn di
agram placed over the landscape, and at any time y
ou might have two dozen tracks playing in your ear
s, all meshing and colliding in surprising ways. T
he path you take determines what you hear, and the
biggest problem with what the composers call a “l
ocation-aware album” is that you may get blisters
on your feet trying to hear it all.
“It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure album,” sai
d Ryan Holladay, who forms this Washington electro
-pop duo with his brother Hays.
They released the app, called Central Park (Listen
to the Light), for the iPhone and iPad in October
. The app is free, but the brothers hope the music
al format will become a commercially viable medium
. It uses a global positioning network to activate
different themes as the listener wanders through
the park. The app contains more than 400 tracks, e
ach tied to a location. They were written to fit t
ogether harmonically like a sonic jigsaw puzzle.
The Holladays are not the only musicians harnessin
g such technology on iPhones, iPads and their imit
ators. Bjork turned her most recent album, “Biophi
lia,” into an audio-visual game of sorts for the i
Phone, letting listeners rearrange and mix musical
elements on some songs.
A few others have experimented with music shaped b
y the listener’s movements. In 2006 Jesse Stiles a
nd Melissa St. Pierre of the Baltimore musical gro
up Face Removal Services hitched a car’s global po
sitioning system to a computer containing hundreds
of dance beats on loops and created what they cal