Murmur

Murmur is a speaker that plays ambient sounds from the tiny world it holds inside. It does not play pre-recorded loops or stream tracks. Inside each Murmur is a place with a life of its own, and what you hear is the sound it makes. Each Murmur holds a tiny world: a place with terrain, weather, a society that inhabits it, and its own rhythms and narratives. You may catch it start to rain, hear the distant hum of a morning rush hour, or the sounds of animals busy doing what they do. The page describes example worlds such as a tiny city and its society (morning rush hours, street musicians, delivery robots, pigeons), a lively forest (chirping birds, crackling leaves, an occasional lost hiker), and a water ecosystem (soothing waves with fish, ducks, and occasional boats). Murmur is presented as something you tune in to or peek in—it's not a world you play or control. It plays even without you. The page also notes there are living agents inside and says, “Just don't shake it.” The company says it did not want to generate infinite soundscapes from a prompt. Instead, it built small worlds that act as infinite ambient sound engines with weather patterns, underlying narratives, and a society of hundreds of tiny agents moving and interacting. What you hear and see is described as an endless stream of situations, turned in real time into a soundscape that is never the same. The page states Murmur is still a prototype. It says a few have been made “for ourselves” and that the core world-sound engines are running the radio the page is hearing now. It also says it is looking for musicians, technologists, and hardware producers to help bring it to desks, keychains, or studios. For listening right now, the page says it has created a radio you can listen to. It also mentions a custom patch in Max for Live that lets you run Murmur worlds directly into Ableton Live. A note on the company: Mattering is described as a design practice for art and advanced technologies that works across culture and technology, translating emerging conditions into new creative languages.