Airwiggles – celebrating a fantastic first year!

On January 9th, we officially launched Airwiggles! Original Airwigglers will remember the previous ‘beta’ website that existed a few months prior, but it was in fact only the start of 2023 when we officially moved to our new host platform, added a bunch of new features, launched a mobile app, and added our most requested feature by far: Dark Mode.

In February we ran our first contest: The Airwiggles X A Sound Effect Sound Design Contest! We partnered with A Sound Effect to create a sound-redesign contest where 153 participants created some sound for some grapes splashing together. We narrowed it down to 5 winners: Damian Pace, Sam Merryweather, Pablo Velasco, Andrea Carsenzuola, and Jade Dickey. You can take a listen to their entries here

March saw the first-ever March Through Sound! A month-long redesign contest organised by Jakub Rehor and Jonas Bengio where 169 sound designers challenged themselves to design audio to a video clip every single day of the month. We had 1,700 submissions! It was a great month full of showreel building and sound experimentation. You can check out the wrap-up here

We had a fairly quiet month in April as we were planning for something later to come… but we did continue to run our monthly tradition of ‘Audio Creation of the Month!’. ACOTM is a monthly prize where we take our favourite sound or music creation posted on the site and give the author a shout-out + award. April’s winner was Steve Simpson – and we also have a YouTube playlist of every single winner in one place, which you can find here

In May, we were still planning for the big event next month behind the scenes. However, one thing that did happen on Airwiggles was the amazing Aidan Hall uploading their final free weekly sound effect library, which they had kept up for 6 months straight! If you didn’t know, we have a Free Samples space on Airwiggles where users share sounds for others to download and use for free: and Aidan donated so much of their time and creativity that we had to give them a shoutout. You can check out the Free Samples space here

The big one! June saw the inaugural Airwiggles Audio Conference (AirCon)! A huge, 2-week, online audio conference which was (and remains) completely free for everyone. We saw live talks, panels, AMAs, and interviews from 75+ inspirational audio professionals from a range of backgrounds: such as Mark Mangini, Adele Cutting, Juan Uribe, Disasterpeace, Austin Wintory, and many many more. It was my highlight of the year for sure – and we’ll be doing it bigger and better this year! You can rewatch all the talks in our AirCon vault here

From one conference to the next, July saw the Airwiggles team go to Develop in Brighton where we represented Airwiggles and met a bunch of you in person. We’ll be at develop again this year so hopefully, and we can completely fill out the pub at the audio drinks yet again.

August for most Airwigglers was spent scouting out team members for the Sound Design Showdown happening next month! One other thing we did do however is run another one of our regular Reel Review livestreams. If you didn’t know, you can submit your sound showreels to be reviewed live on YouTube by Greg and a special guest! All the information you need for this is here

September saw the start of the – I’ll say it – most entertaining sound design contest on the internet: The Sound Design Showdown! We pitted together 54 teams of 3 sound designers in a brutal but hilarious knockout tournament where only one team wins. It was a gruelling 4 week long tournament where teams were sending incredible sound design snippets into battle: but eventually, the winner was crowned after a 50%/49% winning vote: “teamname_final16.wav” featuring Cai Jones, Becky Street, and Luke Evans. You can read a recap of the contest here

In spooky season we were having a much-needed break after AirCon and The Sound Design Showdown… but we did also continue to run our monthly Airwiggles Online Meetups. We now run 2 events a month where any Airwiggler is welcome to join and chat audio with each other. We use a platform with proximity chat so you can have multiple conversations at once. It’s really friendly and wholesome, we recommend you come! You can find info in the events tab

The word “November” just looks incorrect as we all call it “Noisevember” now! Noisevember was another month-long challenge where we asked users to create sound or music based on a list of prompts each day for a month. We had 147 people submit 1800 sounds over the month – over double what we had on the beta in 2022. You can check out our Noisevember recap here

As Airwiggles quietened down for Christmas, we spent December planning and brainstorming for ways we can make Airwiggles even better for next year. One of the features we launched in December was Member Tags. Now when users win contests or complete challenges, they can obtain a little star or symbol next to their name to wear it proud. So far the most anyone has is Steve Simpson, Andrea Carsenzuola, and Scott VR with 3 each. Who will have the most at the end of next year?