The Aquatic Museum (TAM): Collective & Album & App
Interactive Ever-Changing Music Video Clip?
The following chapter details the iterative creation process of an app specially designed for a new project, The Aquatic Museum (TAM)—the name given to a band project, an album, and an app. The sections below lay out the project and the preproduction steps of the album and app. I’ll then take an excursion into other musical creations using chance and surprise elements, some of which have found their way into the TAM app, while others were deemed, in a democratic artistic collective process, too experimental. I’ll conclude with finalized examples of audio interactions in the TAM app. Album and app were released in 2023; the last section of this page presents the release.
The Aquatic Museum Project Presentation
Release: Album, App, and Website
After this thesis was submitted, The Aquatic Museum moved from prototype to public release in spring 2023. The three outlets complement each other: the album fixes one version of each song, the app lets the title track keep changing, and the website ties everything together.
Album
The album The Aquatic Museum (11 tracks, about 39 minutes) was released at the end of May 2023 on CD and on streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music) with composiitons by Claire Parsons and myself. The collective, which I co-founded in 2021 with Claire Parsons and Nicole Miller, recorded the album with Claire Parsons (vocals), Maia Frankowski (violin), Nicole Miller (viola), Annemie Osborne (cello), Eran Har Even (guitar), Jérôme Klein (drums), and me (electric and double bass), joined by the Belgian Q-Some Big Band for the big band arrangements prepared during the score layout and orchestration phase. Charles Stoltz recorded, produced, and mixed the album at Holtz Sound, Markus Schneider mastered it at Skywalk, and Astrid Rothaug created the artwork.
Four singles accompanied the release: “Entrance,” “Large Pleasure Watercraft,” “Trash Tub” (a live recording with Q-Some), and “Trapped Air Bubbles,” the latter featuring underwater images by technical diver and photographer Audrey Cudel. Visual artist Jeanne Held contributed music videos. “Entrance” opens the album and is also the song used to demonstrate the audio player in Why This Format?:
App
The free The Aquatic Museum app has been available on the App Store since 7 April 2023. It runs on iPhone and iPad (iOS/iPadOS 15 or later), on Macs with Apple silicon, and on Apple Vision Pro, while this website hosts web-based examples of the same audio technology. The store description summarizes the concept developed in this chapter:
“The Aquatic Museum App features the multilayered album track ‘Souvenir Shop (Download the App)’ that will transport you into an intricate and imaginative aquatic world hand-drawn by Astrid Rothaug. Take a journey through various museum chambers as you’re guided by visual and musical cues, courtesy of the original Aquatic Museum Band, the Mechelen-based Q Some Big Band, and Valencia-based flamenco percussionist Sergio Martínez (ES).”
The subtitle “(Download the App)” turns the album track into a pointer: on the album, Souvenir Shop is one fixed recording, while in the app the same song becomes the ever-changing music video described on the following pages. The credits also connect the app to my earlier projects: flamenco percussionist Sergio Martínez co-created the Flamenco Tutor app. As during the research, development remained iterative after the launch: version 1.2, released two weeks later, added further interactions, and later updates reduced the download size and refined the user interface.
Website
The project website, theaquaticmuseum.com, gathers the album with streaming links, the app with a video preview, the singles and their music videos, and the band with all collaborators. Like this reflection report, it is built with Hugo.