Echo

Echo is part-game, part-composition tool. You have to solve a series of puzzles to unlock parts of a song. When complete you can remix the song by completing the puzzles in different ways. It’s an interesting concept and quite hard to explain, but a lot of fun to play. The author Yotam Mann has also written a post about the technology behind the game, which is also well worth a read.

Patatap

Patatap is a web-based instrument with a very beautiful combination of animations and sounds from Jono Brandel, of Google’s Creative Lab. It uses Web Audio’s buffer sources to play the pre-loaded samples, and as a result is very responsive to both keyboard presses on desktop and touches on tablet and mobile.

Bitcrushing

Bitcrushing is an effect achieved by intentionally lowering the resolution of a sound, either by lowering the sample rate or by quantising the samples to a smaller number of bits, or both. Jason Frame’s library uses a ScriptProcessorNode to achieve the effect, and is a nice example of how to write your own custom processors in javascript.

Retro game music

A fun article on how to create classic 8-bit video game music using band.js and the Web Audio API.

Beat It

“As Jackson couldn’t fluently play any instruments, he would sing and beatbox out how he wanted his songs to sound by himself on tape, layering the vocals, harmonies and rhythm before having instrumentalists come in to complete the songs.”