Building a collaborative music production environment

Jan Monschke has recently completed his Master’s degree thesis which describes the design of a system for collaborative music making on the web. It’s an approachable but detailed read with a great overview of the signal processing concepts behind the Web Audio API’s various nodes, as well as some more specific sections on the details of his approach, including dealing with synchronisation and three-way merges in the context of a music editing environment.

Mixhub

Mixhub is a collaborative multi-track mixer. You can upload short samples to create your own mix, or join another person’s mix and add your own tracks on top. There’s a simple interface for muting each track, and for adding some effects. You’ll find these at the bottom of each mix page (it took me a little while to figure that out). You can import tracks from Soundcloud, and I can see this application as adding some collaborative features on top of Soundcloud to allow musicians to share ideas more easily.

Lissajous

Lissajous is a live-coding, real-time performance environment which uses the developer console in Chrome as the instrument. It’s worth watching the video before diving into the code because you’ll need to learn some details of the API Lissajous provides before it’ll start to make sense. Lissajous provides multiple sequenced tracks which can trigger samples or synthesised instruments, and is in active development.

Shoreditch Experimental Music School (1969)

“We go back to Shoreditch in 1969 and take a look at their experimental music school, teaching children about the methods of then-contemporary music.”

BBC Outriders: World of Sound

In last week’s Outriders podcast Jamillah Knowles interviewed Dev Moran, the sound designer responsible for iOS game Monument Valley, Rich Vreeland, composer of the music for indie game Fez and me about composition, sound in games and the future of audio on the web.