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Washington-based brothers Ryan and Hays Holladay, better known as Bluebrain, have announced their latest app-album, The Violet Crown, just in time for the South by Southwest festival.
Like Bluebrain's previous apps, The National Mall and Listen to the Light, you can only listen to The Violet Crown within a strictly defined geographical area – a square encircled by Congress Avenue, Frontage Road, East 7th Street and Cesar Chavez Street in Austin, Texas, approximately matching the boundaries of the area covered by the festival.
If you open up the app within that area, you'll be able to explore the album by walking around. It's a novel way of approaching the listening experience – instead of listening to the record chronologically, you listen to it geographically, stumbling into pockets of sound dotted around the streets which blend between each other smoothly. "Think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure of an album," the pair say on the iTunes preview page for the app.
Speaking of the app, The Violet Crown is free to download, but obviously it won't do much good to you unless you're planning to visit Austin, Texas. If you've got a trip to Washington, D.C. or New York in your future, then download The National Mall or Listen to the Light instead.
Bluebrain's apps are impressive, but inherently exclusive – if you can't make it to one of the three places where they're listenable, then you can't experience the band's music. What would really be amazing would be if the Holladays opened up the technology behind their apps (or simply licensed it at affordable rates) so that other bands could populate the rest of the world with their own audiogeographical experiences.
In an interview on the Wired.co.uk podcast shortly after The National Mall was released, the band expressed some enthusiasm for that idea, but there's been radio silence on the subject since.
What do you think, Bluebrain? How about helping the rest of us fill up the spaces that you don't have time to get to?
