Tirp Warble

The street goes quiet just before sunset. Five telegraph wires hum between two crooked poles, and a round little apricot bird made of clay lands on the lowest one, puffs out its chest and waits for the first note to come drifting along. That note is yours to sing. Put a finger anywhere on the screen and Tirp rises or dips to that height on the wires. Keep holding and it sings. Each note in the tune sails towards the bird as a small butter-yellow pebble, and when Tirp crosses one at the right pitch, the note rings out. Reach it right on the beat and it counts as a sweet onset; arrive a moment late and it still sounds, just a little less proudly. Stay on the ribbon that trails behind each pebble and the note keeps singing for its full length. There is a catch, and it is the whole story of the game: singing uses breath. A bubble meter beside the wires drains while your finger is down and only fills again when you lift it. The tunes are written in phrases with small breath marks between them, and those gaps are where you breathe. Sing straight through and Tirp runs out of air, coughs, and goes silent until you let go. Learn to breathe in the rests and whole phrases come out clean, with a little burst of feathers to prove it. How the evening unfolds — Dawn Wire: twelve slow airs for warming up the voice. — Market Wire: twelve busier tunes with quicker steps and longer leaps. It opens once you have collected 14 stars. — Dusk Wire: twelve fast reels with long phrases and tight breaths. It opens at 34 stars. — Every song scores up to three stars, and every song you learn brings one more clay bird to perch on the wires of the title screen. — A daily song arrives each day, with a streak that grows while you keep singing it. — Eight plumages wait in the cupboard, from Sage and Plum to Midnight, unlocked by the stars you earn. The whole thing is shaped from soft clay: fingerprint dimples, chubby birds that squash when they land a note, clouds drifting over the hills. Every sound is a short synthesised chirp or pluck, and each note you sing is pitched to its place on the wires. Settings keep it comfortable: Sound, Haptics and Reduce motion, which calms the screen shake, the feather bursts and the drifting sky. The aviary is kept on your phone. Tirp needs no signal and no sign-in, and there is nothing to buy.

Tirp has learned 36 songs across three wires, and the first one starts the moment you press Fly.