As if 64 kbps MP3 files weren’t enough to make audiophiles want to slash their wrists with a turntable stylus, along comes tweetmic.com. It’s an ingenious little Apple iPhone/Touch app that allows anyone — well, anyone with the appropriate Apple gadget, and $.99 for the application — a simple way to record audio on the go, and to upload that sound to the web. For the time being, the app (and its complementary website) is mostly a place for Internet celebrities to leave the equivalent of throaty public voicemail messages, but some people, like Richard Lainhart, are using TweetMic with soundscapes in mind. It was Lainhart’s Twitter entry yesterday (at twitter.com/rlainhart) that first brought TweetMic to my attention (his TweetMic page is at tweetmic.com/p/ou7nfanfntn). A brief mention by him of “The sound of my world – night insects” followed by a link led to a brief recording of distant insectoid static, that ruffling white noise whose monotony and uniformity suggests some vast hive of activity (MP3). Field-recordists, start your iPods…
The TweetMic site has a long way to go (as far as I can tell) in terms of searchability, geocoding, and community, but in terms of bare-bones functionality it’s off to a strong start. And more on Lainhart at otownmedia.com.
TweetMic has a long way to go but has come a long way since a little over a month ago when I had been in contact with the devs with some suggestions that would be useful to the sound arts community. Just a over a month ago it didnt even have the feature to download the file. Only way to get the file was to view the source code and find the mp3 files location. The list of other recordings by user wasnt there as well. It was essentially just a player of a single recording. So they are definitely developing along quickly. In the long run my hope is to use this in a collaborative sound art piece using the RSS feeds of participating users to drive a multi channel generative installation. http://tweetmic.com/p/ot378sfrz4b
Thanks for the additional info, and for tracking the iterations of the TweetMic software. Good to hear your field recordings, too. Your long-run plan sounds admirable; toward that end, it’d be great to see TweetMic add community/friending/associative tools.