Hays Holladay

Brothers and collaborators Hays and Ryan Holladay create work that explores the intersection of art and technology with an emphasis on music and sound. With projects ranging from a multi-channel sound installation at the site of a former funeral home to composing and arranging a new score for recently discovered footage of the 1939 World’s Fair in collaboration with the Smithsonian Museum of American History, their work spans a range of disciplines and fields.

Recently, the Holladay brothers have garnered critical praise for their pioneering work in location-aware composition: music created and mapped to a physical space, released as mobile apps, that use the device's built-in GPS functionality to dynamically alter the music as the listener traverses a landscape. On Memorial Day, they released "The National Mall", a location-aware composition that music critic Chris Richards called "magical...like using GPS to navigate a dream." They went to on create similar works for Central Park in New York, for SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas (the latter winning MTV/U Music's award for Best Music App at SXSW). A 2013 TED Fellow, Ryan's talk at the annual TED Conference (below) has been viewed more than a million times.