Design I/O (the team behind the fantastic Weather Worlds) and strategic design agency, Eyeball, present a unique take on one of pop music’s most touching stories with John Lennon: The Bermuda Tapes. The interactive album app follows Lennon’s life-changing journey by boat to Bermuda in June 1980 and the demos he recorded there - uncovering a particularly powerful period of creativity for the musician that led to his artistic collaboration from abroad with his wife, Yoko Ono, and the release of Double Fantasy: A Heart Play.

Approached by directors Michael Epstein and Mark Thompson, Design I/O was tasked with figuring out how they could use interactive and generative techniques to bring the story to life. Broken into six immersive chapters, users can follow Lennon’s ocean voyage and the Atlantic storm he battled through, explore the Bermuda beach and visit the disco where Lennon had a creative realisation that lead to his collaboration with Yoko. Heightening the experience are the demo tapes themselves, alongside interviews with both musicians and crew and never-heard-before cassette recordings, all made available to Design I/O for the project.

Encouraged by Yoko’s creative input during the design process, each chapter is aesthetically different, as the designers strived for a more experimental and poetic experience than found in your typical app. John Lennon: The Bermuda Tapes is available from iTunes now, with all net proceeds going to non-profit organisation WhyHunger and its Imagine There's No Hunger campaign, combating global childhood hunger and poverty through sustainable agriculture.

We've seen a rise in interactive apps, like Device 6, that offer the user a new way of experiencing the story as well as music apps that let the user play with the music itself, (Sadly By Your Side for example), but this is the first time we've seen an new way of letting users understand the story behind the music.