Created by oio in collaboration with Mattering, introducing mur mur is a speaker that plays ambient sound from a world within. Unlike a streaming app or an ambient sound generator, mur mur doesn’t generate sounds directly: it simulates a place, with its own rhythms, weather and a small society of inhabitants, whose lives and interactions create an ever-changing soundscape. You can hear the weather changing, the chirping of birds or car honking because that is what’s happening inside.

mur mur is not a world you play or control like a video game. It plays even when no one’s listening. People can sit back and listen, or peek in to see what’s happening. The only control is a dial control on the speaker, that lets you tune into the worlds and control the blend of sound and music.

Everyone has a take on “AI agents,” but they all look exactly the same: hyper-productive chatbots, stuck in virtual cubicle offices.
 So we’ve built a little product where these agents are not only free from work, but also free to live lives of their own! And they make infinite music you can listen to.

Matteo Loglio, co-founder, oio

mur mur comes in three versions, each containing a different world and matching soundscape. “The Block” contains a tiny city made of people, traffic and pigeons, while “the Pond” is a marine ecosystem filled with ducks, fish and the occasional boat. Finally, “the Plot” has a lush forest inhabited by squirrels, owls and a few passing hikers.

From music boxes to Buddha machines, people always tried to bring ambient sounds into our home by recording the world outside. So we decided instead to make a tiny world that we can bring in the home. This meant thinking less about code, music or product design and more about world building. What kind of society or ecosystem might produce sounds worth listening to for hours? That’s a very different starting question to designing a product!

Simone Rebaudengo, co-founder, oio

oio spent the last few years wondering what else could live inside everyday objects: an infinite podcast that walks with you, and more recently a little house for AI agents in your living room mur mur is their latest experiment: a tiny world inside a speaker. The project opens up a conversation about what else AI and simulations can become, beyond mere productivity tools. It invites us to wonder about a near future, where devices could contain entire worlds rather than just lines of code.

We’ve always preferred sowing seeds to drawing blueprints: designing the conditions and then tending to what grows. With Mur Mur, those conditions take on a life of their own, a lively little simulated ecology of autonomous friends. Each one makes the speaker its home and coexists with the others in real time, so what comes out of it is full of surprises. Growing it alongside oio has been a real joy.

Curtis Baigent, co-founder, Mattering

While it might be easy today to generate infinite soundscapes from a prompt, the team 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 an endless stream of situations, turned in real time into a soundscape that’s never the same. For the prototype they used a ESP32 with a 1.82 inch round display, running a the simulation in threeJS. The overall story line (weather and events) are computed on a server. There, they run each creature (agent) with their own story line. As the creatures interact with the world and each other using Qwen3.5 LLM describing the sounds effects and are generated on ElevenLabs or picked from saved sound effects generated in the past. The sounds are then played by two speakers connected via the ESP32 board. The physical device is 3D printed and uses a VR lens looking at a round display inside the device. The hero visuals are now built with Houdini, but their plan is to use a small game engine all running onboard of the device.

Note also that oio and Mattering are looking for musicians, technologists and hardware producers to help bring it to desks, keychains and music studios worldwide.

Project Page | oio instagram | Mattering instagram