Typedrummer

Kyle Stetz creator of the lissajous live coding environment has built this quirky drum machine which converts text into beats. Use - or , to insert pauses, and () for triplets.

Listen to Wikipedia edits

Listen to a real time “sonification” of edits to Wikipedia. Bells are additions to Wikipedia while strings are subtractions. Green circles represent anonymous edits to the site, while white circles are edits from registered users. I was also surprised by the number of purple circles, which are edits from bots.

Web Audio API Developer Tools for Chrome

Following in the footsteps of the excellent Firefox Web Audio Editor comes this promising Chrome extension from Jaume Sanchez. It visualises Web Audio node graphs, and allows you to change their parameters.

Web Audio Slack Channel

I’ve been enjoying the discussion in the new Web Audio Slack channel. It’s a community of developers interested in audio on the web, and is a great place to find out if there is a Web Audio meet up planned near you.

Scrolling Through Sound

At the second London Web Audio meet up, I was particularly impressed by Ehsan Ziya’s demo of his “scrolling through sound” prototype. Ehsan considered how people typically interact with applications, and has experimented with mapping the ubiquitous scroll gesture to navigate through sound. Ehsan uses granular synthesis techniques to map the background audio to the speed and direction of the scroll, while reaching particular points in the page triggers audio events.

Web MIDI API available in Chrome 43 Beta

The Web MIDI API is now available without setting any special flags in Chrome 43 Beta, which should mean we’ll see it in the stable Chrome very soon. With the Firefox implementation well under way and this petition to the Microsoft Edge developers having reached nearly 400 votes, this could be a great year for bringing MIDI to the web.

The Audio Processing Dog House

Although aimed at iOS developers, this article from Jack Schaedler (author of the wonderful DSP primer Circles, Sines and Signals) has a lot to offer any audio developer. It takes us through the building of a simple monophonic pitch-detection algorithm and explains, with interactive diagrams, all of the necessary theory to understand how it works.