Here's an innovative idea - bring together sound (i.e. audio) snippets from around the world, browsing these in the same way as you'd browse an online photo or video gallery. Foundbite lets you do this, sorted by time (in your feed) or looking around you (on a map). It's early days in terms of a critical mass of 'foundbites' but the idea shows promise.

Here's Foundbite in action, with commentary:

Core to Foundbite is its central feed of audio samples, each accompanied by (typically) a handful of stills. In this case a couple of atmospheric shots, with looped audio. The average sound clip length is about 30 seconds. Tap the foundbite's image to start stop the playback.

Or tap the full-screen icon to get the enlarged view here, for maximum ambient effect! The 'map view' toolbar icon locates the foundbite on a worldwide street map.

In fact, the mapping/geolocation turns out to be central in Foundbite, in that you can either look for foundbites 'nearby'....

...enjoying sights and sounds from your own neck of the woods, but you can also, more interestingly, multi-touch zoom into any other part of the globe, looking for the telltale foundbite icons and tapping them to show thumbnails and start audio playback, and then, tapping again to bring them up full-screen....

...like this. Add in the audio effect and it's almost like watching a video, yet with much lower bandwidth requirements, of course.

As you'd expect, there's an account system so that you can upload your own foundbites and generally take part in the project...

Here I'm about to record a foundbite, in the suburbs at night. This is the integrated camera view, tap the shutter icon to start recording and take an initial snap, tap again to take a second or third still, and tap the stop icon to finish the foundbite.

Having finished my foundbite (left), it's a matter of a few seconds to upload it into the main foundbite stream, as here.

To be honest, the system works much better for ambient moments - a waterfall, bird song in a park, and so on, than for specific subjects - a musician, a sports game, since in the latter case you're looking at a couple of stills, plus audio and wishing that you were really watching a video clip, so you could see better what was going on.

But, in time, with a mass of foundbites across the world, it will be a lot of fun to dip into a location and, one day, to be offered a hundred ambient snippets, giving a real impression of how that place sounds. 

You can download Foundbite for free here.