NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

onto, to improve and compress the program.
“We didn’t want something to sound like a machine,
” Mr. Feldman said. “We wanted it to sound like th
ese guys were conducting an orchestra and watching
where you are walking.”
For Central Park the Holladays went for a classica
l feeling. The melodies are mostly stately, slow m
arches played on strings or the piano, usually inv
olving a simple two- or four-chord progression, wi
th some electronic chirps, loops and ambient sound
s added in the higher registers or rumbling beneat
h the melody.
Josh Stewart, a 25-year-old publicist, who writes
a blog about alternative music, was recently part
of a group of 100 Bluebrain fans who came up from
Washington to New York by chartered bus to try the
new app.
At the Lake, Mr. Stewart recalled, he heard paddle
s in water keeping time to a string melody and had
to take off the headphones to make sure the swish
ing rhythm was on the recording and not coming fro
m boaters.
“You are walking around, and you are experiencing
the park in your own way, and the music is kind of
adapting to you,” he said. “I have never experien
ced anything else like that.”
The Holladay brothers grew up in Virginia, but say
they fell in love with Central Park when they wer
e going to college in New York in the late 1990s,
Ryan at New York University and Hays at Columbia.
While still students, they formed a five-piece ele
ctro-pop band, the Epochs, and made two albums bef
ore disbanding in 2008. In New York they were infl
uenced by the works of the avant-garde composer Ph
il Kline and participated in his boom-box walks in
Greenwich Village, during which dozens of people