Three warblers [setophaga petechia] having an important business meeting.

Spring is here! We’ve been superbusy on a Top Secret Thing recently, due for release in the next few weeks. We think you’re going to like it… but in the meantime, why not head on over on to our Facebook page for more birds, robots, audio design and app news.

Happy chirping!

 

Well, this is a big honour for a little startup.

Chirp has been nominated for a Design of The Year Award at the London Design Museum.

The exhibition features some of the best recent British design, and we’re delighted to have been included. The show runs until July 7th, and there’s a lot of great stuff you must see, including a couple of our own favourites: Berg’s splendid Little Printer and the wonderful Raspberry Pi.

Gizmodo did a great piece on the best Digital Design Exhibitors – check it out!

Last but not least – if you were still wondering what Chirp actually is – you can download it for iOS now!

 

Hooray! They like us. We like them. The liking is ON.

We’re super-happy when people show a little love for all the hard work we do. So we’re very happy indeed to be in the Finals of the 2013 Europa Awards in the Best Product Category.

By the way, if you’re wondering what all the fuss is about – you can download Chirp here.

We like to get out of the lab every now and then.

Yes! To breathe the fresh air, look away from the screens, drop the headphones and you know… talk to other people.

So last week, we asked some talented superfriends and fellow audio explorers to come and talk about what they’re doing, for a brand new show-and-tell event called Made of Sound. 

The all-star line-up of sound tamperers included Mr. Patrick Bergel from Animal Systems who introduced the evening. Taking the stage next, Yuli Levtov of software developers Reactify drew useful distinctions between generative, interactive and reactive sound work, while composer Mr. Isambard Khroustaliov from Icarus took us on a deep dive into parametric music.

An impromptu call by Dan Stowell from QMUL on the challenge of realtime birdcall recognition software was followed by Matthew Yee-King presenting his work in livecoding. Returning to the natural theme, Patrick Bergel encouraged us to consider the synthesis of birdsong, data, and mercury-wave memory that is Chirp.

Finally, we were honoured to hear from Mr. Matthew Herbert of the New Radiophonic Workshop, who took a welcome step away from the technology and into the politics of making sound, via a recent piece made from a chilling recording of a bomb blast from the Libyan conflict. Then, as sometimes happens, we all got drunk.

Our first public event was felt to be a Pretty Good Thing, so we’re definitely going to do it again.

Watch this space for details, particularly if you like radio and stories and whispering machines. By the way, if you’d like to talk at the next one, just drop us a line.

Made of Sound was part of the excellent Internet Week Europe - thanks, all.

 

A Big Chester

 

Hello!

We’re very excited to launch Chirp for iPhone. Chirp is a unique app that lets you share things (like pictures or contacts) – using sound.

The app uses special electronic birdsong to ‘chirp’ information over the air to your friends. Every chirp is a little song that links to anything you want to share.

Soon we hope to bring out Chirp for Android, and all kinds of other platforms to come. The app is free to download and use. Let us know what you think!

Download Chirp for iPhone here


Birds sing to communicate: so why not machines?

Chirp is a new system for connecting devices. It works by turning links into audio. Press the big yellow button above to hear the picture being chirped.

Soon you’ll be able to send and receive chirps on your smartphone (iPhone version coming shortly) so any device that makes sound, from doorbells to vinyl, will be able to send data.

That could be quite useful for all sorts of things, we think.

Stay tuned.

Last month we went off to music and tech fest Sonar in Barcelona to do some previews of Chirp, and find out if anyone was as excited as we were by the whole idea.

This was only our third public outing after Future Everything and Music Tech Fest, and we were just a little bit nervous. OK, very nervous. How would the app stand up to being played with by hundreds of sweaty dancers, sound-nerds, audio-tech people? Would anyone care? And Sonar would probably be pretty loud, too? Hmmm.

It turns out we needn’t have worried at all. The app worked brilliantly, despite the Ableton crew cranking up the volume in the demo hall.

And we were blown away by the love for Chirp.

Asking people what they thought of the the beta version, we learnt the word for ‘awesome’ in about ten languages. We had some great ideas from the floor. We made lots of new friends from all over the world. And, we even managed to have a little dance after the demo sessions closed in the evening. In short, Chirp was born.

Our favourite comment of the whole festival? “Yo lo flipo” – “I flipped out”.

Thanks, Sonar. We’ll be back!

Gracias especialmente a Arancha y Noe por su gran trabajo y ser encantadoras.

 

Future Everything is one of the UK’s best-established and most important tech-art festivals. With a great lineup again this year, it was an honour to be asked to talk about some of the thinking behind our work and give the first public previews of Chirp.

We thought it went pretty well.

Read more about this year’s FE2012, and Chirp creator Patrick Bergel’s talk on noise, butterflies, biology and birdsong on the Eye Magazine blog. At some point we’ll get the full talk up on the Animal Systems site.

FE2012 was, as expected: a fantastic event – we met a bunch of remarkable people turning ideas into wonderful things. Somehow defying both gravity and the need for sleep, our own Dan Jones also found time between rebuilds of the Chirp app to co-produce and install Maelstrom: the sound of networks at work.

Thanks to Future Everything Founder & Director Drew Hemmet, and to Conference Manager Dave Holloway.