Word Problems

Part of the Chrome Experiments series of demos, Felix Turner combines Web Audio and WebGL (using three.js) to create visualisations synced with music. The accompanying blog post is really instructive as he explains how the beat detection algorithm works and how it is implemented using Web Audio.

Audio Tags: Web Components + Web Audio

In this talk from the CascadiaJS conference Soledad Penadés from Mozilla proposes a really interesting idea for building Web Audio applications by combining web audio with web components. The latter technology allows us to add custom tags which can have custom behaviour attached to them. Soledad expands on this concept to create the idea of Web Audio Components which allow audio applications to be created in markup, for example:

<audio-context>
  <audio-chain>
    <audio-oscillator frequency="220"></audio-oscillator>
    <audio-waveshaper></audio-waveshaper>
    <audio-oscilloscope></audio-oscilloscope>
    <audio-vumeter></audio-vumeter>
  </audio-chain>
</audio-context>

It’s a really interesting idea, and a great hack which brings together two web technologies in a surprising way. The presentation also includes an interesting section on the history of Google and Mozilla’s Audio APIs and how the Web Audio API came to be implemented in Firefox.

This Exquisite Music Engine

Swedish creative web studio DinahMoe worked on the audio engine for a collaborative art project called Exquisite Forest. This demo allows you to play with the audio engine to generate endless music from simple parameters.

Peaks.js

The BBC have an internal software tool which allows staff to clip out sections of video for reuse from their extensive video archive. As part of adding audio support to the tool to make it usable for radio production, my former colleagues in R&D have open-sourced this waveform editor and generator. It looks to be a really useful library for building web-based audio applications with. More details and links to the source code can be found in their blog post.

Instant Audio Processing Book

This new book from Chris Khoo gives an introduction to the Web Audio API by showing how to build some small applications - a looping audio player and an equaliser. Chris takes us through the building of the application from setting up a web server to writing the HTML interface. There’s a nice section talking about the Bi-quad filter node in the Web Audio API, and how different types of filter work. The book reads more like a collection of blog posts than a comprehensive overview of Web Audio, but for those that prefer something longer form to read and program along with, its a good place to start. It’s good that we’re starting to see coverage of the technology in books as well as on the web.

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary review copy of this book.