The London based creative technologists behind Chirp.io want to change the way we share data with each other. They've created a free iPhone app, which creates musical versions of QR codes.

Chirp is a link sharing service from Animal Systems. Whatever you wish to share (photo, link, or otherwise) is uploaded to Chirp's cloud storage. The iPhone app converts that link to a series of 20 musical notes, which are played in rapid succession. Any Chirp enabled device within 'earshot' can decode that melody and access the shared information (as you can see in the video above)

This means Chirp can do everything which near field communication (aka NFC, which we've reported on before) can do, including (at some point in the near-future) micro-payments of money. But unlike NFC, Chirp can receive data from anything that can emit sound – from tanoys to the radio. This gives it a much more readily available source of 'data transmitting' devices to build from. Animal Systems CEO Patrick Bergel explains that he and his team took lots of inspiration from how birdsong works as a channel of communication in the avian world. He contends that sound is an intuitive way to understand data sharing.

Chirp is neat and impressively effective, and they've potentially opened the floodgates of an audified internet of things. Animal systems developer Daniel Jones notes that now machines can chirp data it sure seems strange to have the other beeps, bloops and burbles, from ATMs to a reversing trucks, be dumb noises devoid of data.  And perhaps it's no bad thing that the future of pervasive computing will have a burbling ring to it.