Over the past few months, I've had my head down working at Animal Systems on a tremendously exciting new platform by the name of Chirp. In a nutshell, Chirp is a way to treat sound as data, enabling devices to communicate with each other using short packets of audio. A sender emits a series of tones; a receiver hears and decodes them, translating them into a code which can point to a picture, text, URL, or even another piece of sound.

My work has been focused on developing an iOS app which will very shortly be seeing the light of day, App Store pending. The experience is simple: Alice want to send a picture to Bob, so she imports it into Chirp, hits a button, and the device chirps it (a sound like this). Bob's phone, and any nearby devices within earshot, can then decode the chirp and display the image. No painful Bluetooth pairing, no typing of email addresses, no USB-stick fiddling.

Of course, the system isn't breaking the laws of entropy and cramming a large JPEG into a second of audio: behind the scenes, the data itself is transferred to a cloud infrastructure and translated into a "shortcode", which is then sent over sound, decoded and resolved. There's an inherently low bitrate in a noisy sonic environment. But then, the bitrate of human speech is estimated at less than 100bps, and spoken language has turned out to be quite a useful feature.

One of the big lessons for me has been the sheer amount of engineering required for a magically simple transaction. Developed from conversations about the information-theoretic properties of avian linguistics, Chirp's audio system has been honed over countless months by a team of DSP gurus based in Barcelona, with an array of simulations operated from UCL's Legion supercomputing cluster, rendering it resilient to hostile reverberant and noisy conditions; the underlying network consists of an infinitely-scalable REST API that we have designed over many iterations, developed by a team of inveterate network architects and now residing in the cloud. The inverse correlation between intuitive simplicity and actual complexity, in the tech domain at least, couldn't be clearer here.

The app is an exploratory first step, and there are almost too many next steps to contemplate. Anything that can transmit sound can send a chirp, so we've been experimenting with all sorts of lo-fi devices: the joy of sending a YouTube video link via a dictaphone is pretty much unrivalled. Throw an Arduino into the equation and suddenly there's an explosion of possibilities of conversing machines.

And there's an equal amount of philosophical potential in this research. Suddenly, the dumb alert tones produced by phones, lorries and fire alarms seem absurd. Why aren't these designed for machine as well as human ears, conveying valuable information about the state of the world? Why is the visual given default primacy as an information medium? And what happens when the typical silence of network communications are suddenly tangible, embodied, and broadcast?

Chirp will be free on the Apple iOS App Store.

The third iteration of sound installation Maelstrom (James Bulley and Daniel Jones, 2012) can be found from now until June 10th at FutureEverything 2012, in the incredible 175-year-old surrounds of Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry.

It generates a continuous piece of music purely using audio fragments taken from YouTube and other media-sharing websites, using new material that is constantly being downloaded, fragmented and categorised based on tonal attributes.

The consequence is that it is an extraordinarily strange system to compose for: we score the dynamics, pitch and spatialisation sequences, but the timbral properties of the sound are constantly shifting beneath us. Each repeat of the same section may thus be radically different, rendering it an ever-changing, amorphous hyper-instrument.

The whole of the FutureEverybody exhibition revolves around ideas of collective action and participatory technologies, with many other great works. Ollie Palmer's Ant Ballet draws on ideas from cybernetics and self-organised behaviour to create a multimedia showcase of his experiments with artificial pheromones to influence the movements of real ants, symbolically conducted by a robotic arm.

Jeremy Hutchison's Extra! Extra! elevates Facebook wall postings into analogical headlines, using sandwich billboards from the Manchester Evening News. It's one of those pieces where the actual visual impact is quite different to how it sounds on paper, highlighting the different modes that our mind places itself in when absorbing information from different contexts. The absurd ring of importance that the piece gives to the utterly banal ("Emma Russell: Having An Okay Day").

Visualisation is one of those tricky areas where it's easy to fetishise the beautiful over that which gives real insight, but Stefaner, Taraborelli and Ciampaglia's Notabilia is one of the more . In general, the curation of the exhibition (by Glaswegian Deborah Kell) is top-class, avoiding the typical trappings when staging a show that's firmly tech-centred and focusing on works that are asking significant and engaging questions, resonating deeply with Manchester's history of decentralised growth and social sprawl.

Tired of doing search-and-replace on the SuperCollider distribution code when developing unit generators, I figured it was about time that some kosher Xcode templates existed for the purpose. And lo, here they are.

Features a standard audio/control rate UGen, plus a version which performs dynamic memory management and thus requires a destructor function.

Norman McLaren was a Scottish animator who, from the early 1930s, produced a huge amount of pioneering film works. Drawing directly onto film stock and making use of new multilayering and colour techniques, he produced some fantastically stylised animations, drawing in abstract and surrealist influences.

Check out this animation of ghosts and ghouls having a party when the clock strikes midnight, soundtracked by Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre. Watch out for the charming Pacman/Galaga-esque visual cast list!

Spook Sport (1940)

He also produced a number of education films and advertisements, for the British General Post Office and National Film Board of Canada amongst others. The Obedient Flame (1939) was a promotional short for British Gas, extolling the virtues of gas power for housewives, and has that wonderful mannered delivery and diagrammatics that never fails to provide amusement.

He also experimented extensively with the opto-acoustic techniques used by László Moholy-Nagy and others: drawing onto film and translating the results into sound, using a sound-on-film techniques and a Moviola device to synchronise both tracks. Pen Point Percussion (1951) is a brilliant documentary about the technique with several sound examples. Dots (1940) is a film produced using these visual and sonic methods together.

Dots (1940)

via Tom

O'Reilly Radar reports that the 'sizzle' sound of mp3 artefacts is becoming increasingly preferred by music listeners. Yes, preferred; in listening tests performed annually over 6 years, listeners have increasingly rated songs with low-bitrate mp3 compression above those that a higher rate.

The author suggests that this is akin to vinyl listeners preferring the crackle of wax over the cleanness of digital recordings — though I have always figured that the vinyl preference is less subjective and more to do with its innate warmth and high-frequency rolloff. The "hot dog at the ball park" analogy is compelling, however, and there's undeniably something comforting about (say) the compression of FM radio when indoors on a cold winter's night, or listening to a cassette through a battered pair of headphones. It's not inconceivable that the mp3 sizzle could be headed for the same fate.

Research from Cornell University, and published in this month's Science (requires subscription), indicates that there is purpose behind the mosquito's buzz besides keeping its human neighbours awake at night: male and female mosquitoes induce harmonic convergence within the frequency spectra of their hums as part of their mating practice. Contradicting earlier research which suggests that males have a highly limited hearing range whilst females are entirely deaf, both sexes were shown to modulate their buzzing frequencies to enter into harmonic love-making.

More info, and video, on Wired's Not Rocket Science.

I was delighted to discover that the Fragmented Orchestra won last night's annual PRS New Music award -- a thoroughly well-deserved accolade for this brilliant trio, who will be realizing the project at FACT in Liverpool over the next few months, alongside field work at the 24 neural sites around the UK that make up the project's cross-geographical cortex.

The Fragmented Orchestra is a groundbreaking composition that will mirror the function of the human brain and the way it processes sound. At the heart of this pioneering new work are 24 ‘neuron units’ placed across the UK in locations chosen for their inherent sonic rhythms. These will include a football stadium, cathedral, dairy farm, school playground, motorway crash barrier and a field. Each solar powered Soundbox contains an artificial neuron modeled on those which fire within the brain’s cortex and will be attached to a resonant surface. Inside these devices, the size of a video cassette, is a minute microphone, computer, Feonic FI drive and amplifier, which will capture the huge array of sounds made at each location.

As each of the ‘neurons’ are stimulated by sound, created by both the public and the elements, they will select audio fragments to be streamed across an invisible network or cortex created between them. Using cutting edge technology, this cortex will form a living instrument which communicates with itself and in turn its audience. The total composition is created through newly-developed software and constantly evolves as the micro-fragments of sound are heard as music.

There's also a stunning introductory video which gives a more informative outline.

I'm honoured to have been invited to develop the project's digital interactive structure, including a web-based element which will allow a visitor to explore each of the neural sites and listen to the collective output of this 'living instrument'. More news on this soon!

robert henke on laptop performance in the supercomputer age /
björk on stockhausen and galaxy formation /
kevin kelly on videogame ontogeny /
alex galloway on network decentralization and control /

The SpACE-Net symposium was a hive of activity across numerous fields, with a diverse range of artists, researchers and techies bringing together a spectrum of ideas surrounding space and sound. A few of the projects that I was made aware of through various encounters:

COMA "promotes participation in contemporary music for musicians of all abilities". Related to the Emotional Orchestra performance at the Tate, and now the nascent all-female Madarms group.

Louise Wilson's work at Orford Ness bears a definite resonance with the photo/sound documentary gathered by Julia and me at Teufelsberg.

Study In Keith (Quicktime mov, begins with extended silence) is the first truly compelling example of live coding that I've ever seen. Stunning. By Andrew Sorenson in his Impromptu environment, inspired by the work of Keith Jarrett.