Bandhub

Bandhub is a collaborative recording environment. Anyone can record a track to create a new song, add tracks to existing songs, or start a song from a YouTube video. The recording app is a native application, but the playback and mixing interface is powered by Web Audio. The developer Pablo Osinaga told me that they are working on adding per-track audio effects using the offlineAudioContext node to render the effects faster than real-time, which will be great to see.

Theresa’s Sound World

Stuart Memo, the prolific author of great Web Audio demos, has released the library he has developed to make working with the Web Audio API a little easier. It wraps up some of the node factory methods on AudioContext to allow nodes to be created with option objects, which cuts down on some of the boiler plate. It provides a neater syntax for connecting multiple nodes together, some convenience functions for loading and playing samples, and also has a selection of pre-built effects such as distortion and tremolo. It comes with the Stuart’s customary great documentation and sense of humour.

ChucK demos

ChucK is a popular music programming language often used for educational and live-coding applications. Arve Knudsen has developed a parser for the ChucK language in JavaScript that can also execute the ChucK code using Web Audio for playback. It’s in its early stages at the moment, but Arve has put together a demo page of examples ported from the official ChucK documentation. It’s an interesting development to see Web Audio being used to allow users of other musical programming languages to develop applications for the web platform.

Fields

In Fields, Sébastien Piquemal has created a collaborative performance where the audience members become musicians, interacting and creating the performance using an array of musical devices. The tablets and smartphones themselves distribute the sound throughout the performance space. A great video on Vimeo explains it better than I can, and the live-performance web server powering the project, Rhizome, is available on Github. Sébastien promises a blog post with more details, so watch this space.

Two ways to see sound

We know from school physics that sound travels in waves. I remember my physics teacher demonstrating the compression and rarefaction that causes sound to transmit using a slinky spring. But there are other fascinating ways to make sound visible. This blog post has videos showing two of them.