MicDrop
The land tells the story
Stories, memories, music and folklore, left in the places where they belong.
Walk closer to listen
Join the beta For heritage & cultural partners
No ads No feed Just stories rooted in place
MicDrop is a place-based audio platform. Drops live in real locations and unlock when you get close enough to hear them.
The idea
All stories belong somewhere
A song at sunrise, a family story at your Nan’s favourite bench, or a piece of folklore in a forest glade.
MicDrop lets you leave stories, memories and sounds in the places where they belong.
The ambition
Preserve the world’s oral history, one story at a time.
Places are full of voices we lose. People remember how a street used to feel. Why a building matters. The songs people sang. The stories families tell each other. The events that changed a community. What happened on an otherwise ordinary patch of land.
MicDrop is a way to preserve those voices and connect them to the places they describe. Not everything left here is formal oral history, and it shouldn’t pretend to be. But over time we want MicDrop to become a custodian of a living oral history of the world.
How it works
The world is the interface
Find
Open the map and see Drops around you.
Walk
Get close enough and they unlock.
Listen
Hear the story in the place where it belongs.
Leave something behind
Record a memory, story, piece of knowledge, music or message for whoever comes next.
What lives on the map
A different kind of map
Every place can contain more than one story. A street can hold the memory of someone who grew up there, a historian explaining what stood there before, music recorded in a nearby venue, and a story passed through generations. MicDrop lets those voices sit alongside one another, and says which is which.
Oral history
First-hand testimony and recorded experience.
Memory
Personal and family stories attached to meaningful places.
Local history
The events, people and details that explain what happened here.
Folklore
Legends, traditions and stories handed down over generations.
Music & sound
Songs, performances and sounds that belong to a particular place.
Personal Drop
Small moments, observations and messages left for the people who come next.
Storyteller
Local history researched from public sources, written and voiced by MicDrop so a new place is never silent.
Most of what you can hear on the map today is that last one. When we open a new area we seed it with short stories researched from public sources such as Wikipedia, performed by narrator characters using synthetic voice, so nobody arrives to an empty map. Every one is labelled as ours and credits where it came from. They are a starting point, not the point. The record we actually want is the one people leave themselves.
Where sources matter, they should be visible. Where a story is someone’s memory, it should say so. Different voices don’t always agree. That’s part of the record.
How a Drop carries its provenance
Oral history
[Title of recording]
- Location
- [Where it was recorded]
- Recorded
- [Date of recording]
- Contributor
- [Who is speaking]
- Collection
- [Holding archive]
- Rights
- [Terms of public access]
Memory
[Title given by the contributor]
- Location
- [Chosen by the contributor]
- Recorded
- [Date left on the map]
- Contributor
- [Display name, or anonymous]
- Source
- Left directly on MicDrop
Storyteller
The Parish of Two
- Location
- Aldrington, Hove
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Aldrington”
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Voice
- Old Tom, synthetic
- Status
- Live on the map
Note
The first two records are blank samples. They show the fields a Drop can carry, and
describe no real recording, person or collection. The third is a real MicDrop Drop
that anyone in Hove can walk to today.
What it isn’t
Not another social network
- No endless feed.
- No followers.
- No popularity contest.
- No advertising.
MicDrop is designed to make you look up, walk somewhere and hear something you couldn’t hear anywhere else. We want the incentives to stay simple: leave something worth finding, and make a place richer for the next person who visits.
For heritage & cultural partners
Bring history back to where it happened
Museums, archives, universities and community organisations already hold extraordinary recordings. Most are heard only by people who know where to look. MicDrop can make those voices discoverable in the places they describe.
- A dockworker’s recollection at the old harbour.
- A musician outside the venue where a movement began.
- A wartime memory on the street where someone lived.
- A traditional story heard in the landscape that gave rise to it.
MicDrop isn’t a replacement for an archive. It’s a layer that can bring an archive back to the place it came from.
Over time
A map that gets richer with every voice
- One story makes a particular place more interesting.
- Thousands begin to reveal a neighbourhood.
- Millions could create an entirely new way of understanding the world around us.
Individuals can contribute the long tail of human memory. Cultural institutions can bring trusted collections. Musicians, historians, writers and storytellers can add new work made specifically for a place.
Every new Drop makes the map richer. And every richer place gives someone another reason to explore.
Membership
Become a custodian of the world’s oral history
History shouldn’t depend on advertising. MicDrop is being built around a simple membership and aligned partnerships rather than selling attention or filling the product with ads. The ambition is to make something useful enough to endure.
About the price of a coffee, each year
Membership unlocks every story on the map and the right to add your own, and it supports the work of collecting them. Your contribution keeps local voices alive for the people who live here now, and the people who come later.
Final pricing and details will be confirmed at launch. Beta testers listen free.
A fair exchange: members fund the record, so the record never has to sell them.
Preserve the world’s oral history, one story at a time.
MicDrop is in beta on iPhone. Walk somewhere that matters to you, and leave something worth finding.
The beta runs through Apple TestFlight and is invite-only while we widen it. If the link isn’t open yet, email guy@findmicdrop.com and we’ll send you one.