Chirp Pong – uses microphones and audio for networked game play

An experiment builds a two-player competitive, pong-like game that uses short audio chirps picked up by each phone’s microphone to transmit game state between two devices. Implemented as static HTML and running in the browser, the networking layer encodes state changes as audio noises which the Web Microphone API decodes; players hold their phones close together and the gameplay connects them without any traditional network socket or server. The design intentionally departs from classic pong by adding graphical and gameplay twists to make interactions more interleaved and entertaining.

The project demonstrates that browser-based audio signaling is a practical method for nearby multiplayer play: the prototype “seems to work,” showing that simple, dependency-free web pages can exchange game state via sound. Development notes include using Claude Opus 5.5 Extra in Claude Code during the build. The approach highlights a low-barrier, privacy-friendly way to create local multiplayer experiences, while implying the usual tradeoffs of proximity, audio reliability and latency. It’s a compact proof of concept for novel, serverless phone-to-phone game networking.