The National Mall: A Location-Aware App-Album

It comes in the form of an iPhone app, which you download to your handset and then open up while you’re standing in the National Mall — the green space between the Lincoln Memorial and Capitol building. As you move around the area, the music changes.

“For example,” Ryan Holladay, one half of Bluebrain, told Wired.co.uk, “Approach a lake and a piano piece changes into a harp. Or, as you get close to the children’s merry-go-round, the wooden horses come to life and you hear sounds of real horses getting steadily louder based on your proximity.”

It’ll be available soon on Apple’s App Store, and iPad and Android versions will follow in time.

It’s the first in a series of location-aware albums that will focus on different places. The next will be in New York’s Prospect Park, and then there’ll be one running the length of the Highway 1 coast road in California.

Unfortunately, you can’t listen to any of them outside the locations they’re designed for, but in an exclusive interview for the Wired.co.uk podcast, Holladay told us he’s considering making the tools he used to create the album more widely available. For bands who are interested in reinventing the experience of listening to an album, that’ll be worth waiting for.

Hear some samples from The National Mall, along with the aforementioned interview, on Episode 27 of the Wired.co.uk podcast.