I dropped my phone the screen cracked

A great library from Bill Orcutt which wraps the Web Audio API in an idiosyncratic but powerful domain language. By removing a lot of the boilerplate, the “hello world” of Web Audio synthesis, a simple sine wave, becomes

__().sine().dac().play();

I’m quite excited about this library. I think it will be a very useful prototyping tool for playing around with Web Audio concepts in the developer console, for example. Check out Bill’s demos on tumblr before diving into the Github project.

Plans to improve scriptProcessorNode

The scriptProcessorNode in the Web Audio API is one of the most powerful but also most misused features. It allows us to use JavaScript to perform arbitrary processing on audio one buffer of samples at time. The problem is that this processing happens in the “main thread” of the browser. The passing of data between the script processor nodes and the other nodes in an audio graph introduces latency, and the performance of the code is susceptible to influence from whatever else the browser is doing at the time (updating the UI, for example). The W3C Audio working group are debating a proposal to introduce a new node which offloads this processing to a “worker”.

The details of the debate are hard to follow at times, but this is certainly one to watch since any changes are likely to have an influence on how we write certain Web Audio applications.

Calculating BPM using Javascript and the Spotify Web API

José Pérez read Beat Detection Using JavaScript and the Web Audio API and decided to hook it up to the Spotify API. You can search for a track from Spotify’s catalogue and your browser will calculate the tempo. A simple but powerful demo.

p5.js

Processing is a programming language for audio and visual applications. p5.js “is a JavaScript library that starts with the original goal of Processing, to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators, and beginners, and reinterprets this for today’s web.”. I particularly interesting part of this project for us is the “p5.sound” library which makes working with one-shot samples and multi-node synthesis quite a bit easier.

The art of the loop

“Most current pop music is created not with live instruments, but from pre-formed, off the shelf chunks of music known as loops. Musician Matthew Herbert explores the art of the loop and the million-dollar industry that has grown up around it, and asks whether it is setting music makers free from the constraints of traditional instruments or killing creativity.”