The Miró Quartet

Late last spring Masonry was lucky enough to have an opportunity to work with a renowned string quartet called the Miró Quartet, who are based here in Austin, Texas. One of the great things about what we do is the chance to work across all kinds of businesses and industries and this was one of the more interesting and unique projects we have ever worked on.

Wyatt Brand, a strategic partner of Masonry's, handles the PR for the quartet and brought us in to help with the web presence. In early September, they had planned a major PR push around a new documentary and album called "Transcendence" which documents the Miró Quartet's recording of Franz Schubert's final composition for string quartet. Wyatt Brand and the quartet felt like with the upcoming media attention, the timing made sense to create a new online presence. You can read more about the project here.

Our task as their digital agency was to create this new digital presence that visually expressed who they are and something which inspired people to learn more about them, learn about Transcendence, and listen to their music. We had beautiful footage from the documentary to work with which we used as part of the overall experience by providing video background elements in various parts of the site.

Separately, a task of ours was to create a seamless experience for streaming the quartet's music while navigating the website. While mp3 streaming is not uncommon, creating a persistent stream while navigating to different pages on the site is. One method is opening up a streaming element in a separate window, but that process can feel a little disjointed and we wanted to do something more seamless than that. 

Our solution involved creating a player that is "sticky" to the footer and then loading the other pages via AJAX, which would allow the music to continue to play even though new pages were being loaded.

We were able to enjoy the persistent streaming ourselves as we were working on the site. Listening to the quartet's beautiful music while exploring the site without the stream being cut off or reset really added to the overall experience of visiting the site and we were pleased with the outcome.

Please go visit the site here. They are incredible musicians and wonderful people, so check out their story and their music and pass it on to your friends!