ALMA is an experimental synth band interested in expanding the way our listeners experience music and connect to their surroundings. Our project is a concept album of personal and political songs written as a love letter to New York City, but released as a series of interactive musical experiences placed throughout the five boroughs like musical Easter eggs. Each song is intended to be heard in the location that inspired it. To realize this vision, we are developing an augmented reality mobile app that allows a listener with headphones to explore a piece of NYC through an interactive version of each song on the album. Our mission is to offer a new kind of connection with our city through interactive musical experiences of songs that are inextricably tied to the city site that inspired them.
Our idea is to create and launch a mobile app in tandem with our debut album that allows a listener to walk through a 3D audio environment of the song at the location that inspired the song in New York City. Like augmented reality mobile games like Pokemon Go create a visual, game-ified, overlay on top of real locations, our app would allow a listener with headphones to explore a piece of New York City through a song via an audio overlay that our listener can affect by moving through space in the location that inspired the song. The result will be a dynamic, location-based album that provides each listener with a unique and responsive listening experience, creating a strong bond between the listener and the city. We are grateful to have received a NYFA/NYSCA artist fellowship which has allowed us to begin this project and record some of the songs. With the support of the Awesome Grant, we hope to start designing the app and integrating our songs.
It’s our hope that we can use the powers of technology to offer New Yorkers a fresh relationship with parts of their city. Moreover, we share deeply personal stories and in doing so hope to invite our audience into their own experience