Sing a Little Song will bring a new form of birdsong to the city, guided and controlled by online interactions.

Eight ‘digital songbirds’ will be built and placed around the city – these small boxes will connect wirelessly to the internet and contain a microcontroller and speaker system for playing simple melodies.

The songbirds will be hidden in public locations: in trees, on rooftops, in dark alleys. Throughout the day they will sing songs based on messages sent to them through social media services. For example, the tweet “#songbird #castlepark what a beautiful day!” will be converted into birdsong using field recordings, sentiment analysis, vocoding, speed adjustments, and other techniques. The song will reflect the general sentiment of the tweet (in this case, beautiful), and certain keywords will be combined with birdsong field recordings to make them just audible. The resulting song will be played from the songbird placed in Castle Park.

Inspired by the rich tradition of British birdsong recordings by Ludwig Koch and others, Sing a Little Song will provide the city with a new form of abstract communication by giving them control over their own soundscape. It will connect online interaction with real-world sound in a non-intrusive yet beautiful way that ties in with existing associations of nature and song.

This Playable City Award idea is brought to you by:

Lucky Frame, a small creative studio based in Edinburgh. Founded in 2008 by Yann Seznec, it is today comprised mainly of three artists - Yann, Jonathan Brodsky, and Sean McIlroy - who design and produce projects ranging from games to instruments, all with a focus on unusual and accessible approaches to music technology.

Yann founded Lucky Frame to further develop his music software hacks. Since then he has produced a number of music-focused projects as a solo artist and with Lucky Frame. These have included an electromechanical musical installation triggered from live mushroom spores and a live performance reacting to a meteor shower (Perseid Nocturne). Yann has been touring with Matthew Herbert over the past year, performing on the custom built “Sty Harp” for One Pig, playing in venues from London to Tokyo.

In addition to installations Lucky Frame has developed games and music software, including the BAFTA Award-winning music game Bad Hotel for iOS.