This latest project by the Tenement Museum’s ongoing Digital Artists in Residence Program (DARP) uses music to explore contemporary immigrant experiences and cultural identity. The site utilizes a series of original folk songs to reflect the varied cultures within a single neighborhood; they’re a nice representation of the way immigrants impact and are impacted by their surroundings. While it does a great job at enabling the exploration of one neighborhood’s ambient sound, the strength of this site lies in the interactive environment created for the content. It’s not only a wonderful celebration of diversity but a standalone educational experience.

• The interface consists of an interactive map of New York’s Lower East Side, overlaid with a series of dots that represent locally recorded audio samples; a selection tool activates sound samples by clicking and dragging one of five discs over the dots.

• Technically, the site combines HTML pages with one main embedded Flash app that provides the user with a map-based interface connecting to a repository of geo-located sounds, images and text.

• A simple administrative tool allows curators to update and maintain the map content.