Jory Prum: 1975-2016

It is with great sadness that I mark the recent passing of Jory Prum. Jory was best-known for his sound engineering work at LucasArts where he created the sound tracks for well-loved games such as Sam & Max, Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. Jory was also an enthusiastic early adopter of Web Audio, contributing his experience with game audio to the early designs of the Web Audio API and collecting interesting links and articles on his HTML5 Audio blog. I was lucky to spend time with Jory through this shared interest and his warmth, generosity and enthusiasm will be missed by all who knew him.

Novation use Web MIDI to bring Circuit to the web

Circuit is a MIDI-controller, synth, sequencer and drum machine combined into a playable hardware interface. To allow more control over the device, Novation have built a Web MIDI-powered application that allows you to upload new samples as well as edit and share patches. It’s exciting to see that this isn’t a side-project for Novation. They’ve promoted the app heavily on their homepage showing the confidence they have in the stability and utility of Web MIDI.

mod-synth.io

mod-synth.io is a really slick synthesiser application which allows you to build patches in a “modular” style by connecting oscillators, filters and other building blocks together. The UI is intuitive with a handy tutorial to help you get started. The synth has MIDI support so you can play using a real controller instead of the default QWERTY mapping, and you can save patches by logging in. One of the best-executed web synthesisers I’ve seen.

Cracked

Way back in issue 24 we learned about Bill Orcutt’s minimal DSL for chaining audio graphs - “I dropped my phone the screen cracked”. Bill has now packaged the library up as a standalone OS X application, complete with MIDI interface, called Cracked. It combines a live-coding interface with MIDI inputs that, says Bill, “feels like a software equivalent to one of the cheap Silvertone or Kay guitars I use – something primitive and stripped down, where the inner workings are exposed and easily modifiable, and the music feels like it’s being made by you rather than by the program.”

Wire magazine carry more details of the backstory, and a demo video.

Mira

From Active Studio and Plan8 comes Mira, a “meditative experience for web, mobile, physical installation and VR all using the same JavaScript codebase”. Play with the application in the first link and read more about the technical details of this ambition project over on medium.

Envelope Generator

envelope-generator is a library from Joe Sullivan to help you build envelopes for your Web Audio applications. An envelope is a series of parameter changes that you might apply, for example, to the volume of a sound to synthesise the rise and fall of a real instrument. The library lets you easily specify what are known as ADSR (attack-decay-sustain-release) envelopes without worrying about the fiddly parameter scheduling you’d have to do when working directly with the Web Audio API.

midi-ports: easy access to MIDI hardware

A handy library to make it easier to work with attached MIDI devices, midi-ports provides inputID, outputID, name, and manufacturer of all attached devices as JS objects.

MIDI Logger - debugger console for MIDI

Attach a MIDI device and quickly see which messages are being sent as you use it. Great for debugging Web MIDI applications or writing new device interfaces.

A curated list about Audio Visualisation

A huge list of resources and links about visualising audio both on the web and elsewhere.

WKT Audio: Web Audio API file loader

WKT Audio is a library which allows you to load a sound and a predefined part of a Web Audio node graph at the same time. For example, the following code loads two samples, and attaches them both to a gain node.

var resources = {
  snare: "sounds/snare.mp3",
  drum: "sounds/drum_loop.mp3",
  nodes: function nodeGraph(sound) {
    var gain = audioContext.createGain();
    gain.gain.value = 0.5;
    sound.connect(gain);
    gain.connect(audioContext.destination);
  }
}

var sound = wktAudioBatch(resources);
sound.snare.play();

Gregorian Voices: Early Roman Catholic Church Song Generator

If you wish, allow yourself to escape your busy life for a while, and re-connect with yourself. Close your eyes, and let the ancient sounds of Monks carry you away.