Improve the Web Audio API by writing tests

The W3C, who are standardising the Web Audio API and the Web MIDI API, have a comprehensive set of tests that browser vendors can use to make sure their implementations are compliant with the specification. The tests for the Web Audio and Web MIDI APIs are still at a very early stage though, and could really use your help. Writing tests, or porting them from the Webkit, Blink or Gecko code bases, is a great way to improve support for the APIs, and will make it easier for other vendors to add support. I wrote a blog post to show you how to get involved.

Web Audio Editor in Firefox

Mozilla are working on an extension to their developer tools which allows debugging and editing of Web Audio applications. It’s only available in Firefox Nightly at the moment, and you have to enable it by clicking on the “cog” icon when you open the developer toolbar. It currently allows introspection of the graph of nodes within an AudioContext, and the editing of parameters of individual nodes. This looks like it will be an incredibly useful tool for Web Audio developers, and is definitely one to watch.

Visualising Audio with the Web Audio API

One of the use cases used to inform the design of the Web Audio API was to allow sound and music to be turned into synchronised visuals in a straight forward way. The API has a built in AnalyserNode to allow time and frequency domain analysis on the fly. You can also use the ScriptProcessorNode to do more sophisticated analysis using your own JavaScript code. In this talk from last year’s HTML5DevConf Jordan Santell covers all of those topics and more.

Designing Godzilla’s Scream

The sound effects we hear in TV, film and games are often not created in the way we’d expect them to be. In the case of Godzilla, unable to find a real life giant lizard monster, the sound designers had to resort to a combination of clever techniques to generate the iconic noise.

The New York School of Synthesis

A series of videos on how to program synthesisers, including a lot of well-explained basics on oscillators, envelopes, envelope-controlled filters and more, most of which is directly applicable to programming the Web Audio API. The first video in the series starts pretty slowly, so skip ahead to the last third to see how to programme a string patch. As is customary for the final link of this newsletter, it also features a bloke with a beard.