Building a HTML5 Guitar Tuner

An in-depth blog post from Google’s Paul Lewis on how he built a guitar tuner application using Web Audio and other HTML5 technologies. What I love about this post is how Paul details the various approaches he took to achieving a reliable tuning algorithm as well as how he went the extra mile to make it work offline (using Service Workers) and as a “home screen” app (using manifests). I spoke to Web Audio spec co-editor Chris Wilson today and he said he’s now deleted all his other guitar tuning apps in favour of this one - high praise indeed!

A brief history of synthesis with the Web Audio API

The video of a talk I gave at ScotlandJS is now available on YouTube. In preparing for this talk I spent some time building a set of sample applications to illustrate the basic principles of additive, subtractive, FM, sampling and granular synthesis which I hope will be a useful learning resource if you’re getting started with synthesis in Web Audio.

beet.js - a polyrhythmic sequencer library

Polyrhythms are formed when multiple simple rhythms are layered on top of each other. With this library from Ehsan Ziya you can build sequences of polyrhythms using a simple API.

Beat frequencies

Frequency beating is the phenomena you hear when two monotonic sounds that have close but not identical frequencies are played together. When this happens, you hear a “beating” effect at a different frequency. In the first link you can read more about the beating effect and hear the results rendered using Web Audio. In the second learn more about whether, as some people believe, this phenomena can influence your brain waves.

Dynamic Sound with the Web Audio API

A good introductory article on Web Audio from Robby Ingebretsen. This article is notable because it is part of a web development series from Microsoft, and it shows how the Web Audio API is finally available in all of the main browsers and platforms with the arrival of Microsoft’s latest browser Edge.

Reverb and reverb design: a history

A comprehensive slide deck from Sean Costello’s recent AES presentation on the history of (artificial) reverberation - the effect used to give the illusion to the listener that a sound has been recorded in a different acoustical space. If you want to generate reverberation effects using Web Audio, the best place to start is with the ConvolverNode. The Web Audio spec has some useful informative sections on how to use the Convolver, and how to record impulse responses of real spaces to simulate their reverb characteristics. And Alan deLespinasse’s reverbGen library uses JavaScript to generate “fake” impulse responses.

120years.net

120 years is an ambitious project from Simon Crab to document the history of electronic music and all of its key figures and movements. Warning: if this is your idea of fun be prepared to lose a few hours!