AudioKeys: a QWERTY keyboard for Web Audio projects

AudioKeys, a library from Kyle Stetz, allows you to map the keys on a standard QWERTY keyboard to musical notes. If you’ve built an instrument with the Web Audio API this allows anyone with a standard keyboard to play it. The library provides shortcuts for shifting the octave range of the keyboard and for setting the velocity of notes. It also solves some tricky problems such as what to do with notes when the user switches browser focus to another tab. It’s event-based too, so it’s easy to decouple from the rest of your code, or to combine with other input sources such as MIDI instruments.

Learning and tutorials

The Web Audio API: What is it?

To accompany the Tuts+ video series on Web Audio from Stuart Memo, they’re also publishing a series of blog posts, starting with this brief introduction to the API.

Web Audio Primer

Andy Sylvester has written a series of tutorials on various aspects of the Web Audio API which use the Theresa's Sound World framework also created by Stuart Memo. The lessons are focussed on synthesis and building a simple instrument.

Web Audio Meet-up in Lausanne, Switzerland

Cruncher, a web design agency in Lausanne, are hosting the first Swiss Web Audio meet-up on the 24th August 2015 at their offices. Contact Cruncher or @stephband for more information.

soundio: a standard way of creating music sequence data in JSON

Last week we heard about the work of the W3C’s Music Notation Community Group and the effort to find a standard for exchanging sheet-music-like documents.

Stephen Band pointed me at another interesting proposal in this space - a light-weight JSON format for exchanging note sequence information that is independent of the way that notation is presented visually. I can see an exchange format like this being very useful as an intermediate serialisation format for music sequencer applications, for example.

This is Not a Machine Learning

An interesting essay and sound art piece that uses the Web Audio API to generate increasingly complex variations of an initial piece. The audio is synchronised to a visualisation built with three.js, and the source code is available to dive into in more depth.

Making a game: audio

A great article from the developers of the Blend4Web game engine on how to create and record audio effects for a game. They also discuss how to synchronise those effects with the actions of the characters in the game. The authors confess that they are amateurs in this aspect of game design, but I think that makes the article a more interesting read as they really get into the practical details.