Chirp lets you send a weblink with a tune

The sound of birdsong usually marks the break of dawn. But a similar ? but distinctly electronic-sounding ? type of twittering could soon indicate the arrival of a picture or message from a friend. It's the sound of a new iPhone app that might change the way we share information with each other.

Chirp, launched today, is a new service that allows people to share digital content ? web pages, pictures, video or pretty much anything that can be stored on an online server ? by playing short tunes to each other.

To begin with, Chirp works much like any other social media service: you use a free app to upload whatever you want to share ? for example, a picture ? to a web server. What's different is how Chirp notifies other people about your snap: it turns information about your upload into a sequence of 20 musical notes, played rapidly through your phone's speaker, which can be heard and decoded by any other Chirp-equipped device within earshot. That device then retrieves the shared information and displays your picture accordingly.

Click here to test a chirp of our own

Of course, there are numerous ways for people to swap stuff already. But Patrick Bergel, chief executive of Chirp creator Animal Systems, argues that sound is more intuitive and informal. Because "chirps" carry like speech, he says, we instinctively understand their use and their limitations much as we understand how to participate in a spoken conversation.

By contrast, many people struggle with technologies like Bluetooth, which need devices to be paired up, while email or other messaging services require you to know (and type) the addresses of people you want to send things to.

Bergel also points out that devices capable of playing and recording sound are both more plentiful and less expensive than gadgets built to use alternatives like NFC, the electronics industry's emerging standard for sharing between devices.

That offers much more flexibility in their use: for example, a "dumbphone" can record a chirp to be used by a more capable device at a later date, or they can be readily broadcast over the radio or a PA system. In that respect, they're a bit like the audio equivalent of QR codes, the two-dimensional barcodes that are now widely used in advertisements to send smartphone users to particular web addresses.

Sweet sounds

"It's an interesting door opening, this use of sonic signalling ? using sound to alert us in a more subtle way than a beep," says Julian Treasure, chairman of The Sound Agency, an audio design consultancy. But he sounds a note of caution: "There's a little bit of protocol in the real world which is quite important. If you speak to me, we understand that we've entered into a social contract. But sound that you haven't given permission to receive is noise, and generally unwelcome."

Burbling devices thus have the potential to become as unwelcome to unwilling eavesdroppers as novelty ringtones, one-sided cellphone conversations or "sodcasting" ? playing music through speakers on a cellphone for all to hear, usually on public transport.

Making the chirps sound pleasant took some careful sound design. The smartphone-generated chirps sound "birdish" rather than birdlike, says the Animal Systems developer, Dan Jones. While earlier attempts sounded more lifelike ? "I made a pretty passable wren," says Bergel ? test users found them creepy, much as robotic attempts to recreate human behaviour can fall foul of the so-called uncanny valley.

Making them work in practice was another challenge. Sharing needs to work in noisy, social environments and it's easy for a chirp to get drowned out by background noise, particularly in echo-prone spaces like hard-surfaced caf?s and bars. So half of each chirp comprises an error-correcting code that ensures the message is received accurately.

Both Treasure and Bergel think there's potential to extend the principle of sonic signalling beyond file-sharing. Anything that produces a sound could similarly carry information, notes Bergel. "Imagine the beeping that a lorry makes to warn pedestrians when it's reversing," he says. "What if that was also telling the loading bay what it's carrying?"

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