Issue 52
Piano Phase
A wonderful visualisation of Steve Reich’s 1967 “Piano Phase” by Alexander Chen. Two pianists repeat the same twelve note sequence, but one gradually speeds up. Here the pianos are Web Audio-based, and the visualisation shows them drifting slowly in and out of sync. Chen is a Creative Director at Google Creative Lab and has produced some other amazing audio-visual projects, including the 2011 Les Paul Google Doodle.
Web MIDI Application Developer at Novation
Sponsored post
We’re creating a simple Web MIDI powered app for a new Novation product, and we’re looking for a seasoned web developer to help us deliver it on a contract basis. If you love the Web MIDI API, and you’re familiar with Amazon AWS and front-end development, come and work with us! We anticipate a month or two to get our first version ready. After that, we’ll see where it takes us! We’re UK based, but happy with remote working - though the closer to GMT you are, the better.
Typatone
In Typatone, from the team that brought us the amazing patatap, text is turned into music as you type. Each key corresponds to a note and after a period of typing the tune you have composed is played back to you. You can download your composition, share it with friends using a permanent URL, or even embed the application elsewhere using an iframe.
Web Audio Advent Calendar: Call for Contributions
Advent is nearly here, and the folks behind wham-js
need your help
in building 25 Web Audio synths for the festive season. The full
details and how to contribute are in the link below.
Amplitude Modulation Synthesis
A great tutorial and demo from the Keith McMillen Instruments blog on synthesising sounds using AM Synthesis. It’s fascinating how complex sounds can be created from simply combining two oscillators in clever ways, and I love the new on-brand KMI virtual keyboard!
Web Audio Multiple Track Waveform Editor
A multi-track waveform editor inspired by Audacity and implemented
using the Web Audio API by Naomi Aro. This application already
supports multiple tracks, waveform editing and drag-and-drop upload of
files. There’s also support for recording tracks directly into the app
using your computers inputs (and the getUserMedia
API), and the
source code is available on github.
Working with the Babylon.js Game Engine
In this article David Rousset from Microsoft shows us how to use the
Web Audio API, and in particular the babylon.js
open-source game
engine, to create the sense of space in our web audio application by
using directional sound and 3D sound models. It’s great to see more
game-oriented tutorials, and in particular to see how well Microsoft
Edge now supports the Web Audio API.
Paul Adenot at jsconf.asia ‘15
Paul Adenot, co-editor of the W3C Web Audio spec and chief Web Audio hacker at Mozilla has been out in Singapore this week speaking at the jsconf.asia conference. He demo’d the Web Audio API and in particular how we can use it for live coding and demoscene applications. The videos of his talk aren’t yet available, but the minimal demoscence-style literate program he’s written, and the slides of his talk are well worth digging in to.
Tracking with Ultrasound Beacons
I found this discussion on the W3C Audio Working Group mailing list interesting. Some companies are using inaudible, high-frequency sounds to allow them to link users devices together. For example, the fact that you’ve used your mobile to visit an advert you’ve just seen on TV might be recorded by embedding a high-frequency tone in the TV ad that your mobile device (surreptitiously) records. I don’t think responsibility for preventing this lies within the scope of the Web Audio API, but it’s an interesting challenge for the web platform as a whole.