1st Web Audio Conference submission deadline

IRCAM, the famous Parisian centre for electronic music research, are hosting a Web Audio conference on the 26th-27th January 2015. The deadline for submissions is on the 10th October. The conference organiser Samuel Goldszmidt has contacted me to share the new guidelines for submission which clarify how to submit your talk. If you’ve built a demo or library using the Web Audio API, and can take some time to explain how and why you built it, I’d encourage you to submit. And I’ll see you in Paris in January!

Oscilloscope

When debugging Web Audio applications it’s often very helpful to be able to visualise the sound generated at particular points in the graph of nodes you have created. This code snippet from Kevin Cennis provides an “oscilloscope” that does just that. It has a useful sensitivity slider to help lock the refresh frequency of the scope to the frequency of sound you’re creating - this freezes the waveform to make it easier to see what’s going on.

Web Audio synthesizer by Luke Teaford

Luke Teaford has built this 2-oscillator synthesizer using the Web Audio API. It has some really fun presets, and enough flexibility to create your own sounds. It would be great to see this working with the Web MIDI API so that the synth could be controlled from an external MIDI controller.

Web Audio Mock

If you’re building a large Web Audio application, you might have wondered how to write automated tests for your code to make it easier and safer to refactor, for example. Relying on the “real” Web Audio API in your tests is difficult as it restricts how quickly they can run, and requires a test environment which supports the API. This library from mohayonao provides a “mock” Web Audio API implementation which you can rely on in place of the real thing.

NASA Scientists listen to data

An interesting article from NASA on how their scientists turn the output from data collected by the sensors on satellites into audible frequencies. By playing them back very quickly, and training their ears to make sense of the sounds, they are able to review and find interesting signals in the data much more quickly than they could do if they relied on plots and other visualisations.

Bob Moog Foundation pays tribute to Leon Theremin

In celebration of Leon Theremin’s birthday, the Bob Moog Foundation pays tribute to Bob’s “virtual mentor”, a titan pioneer of electronic music technology. Michelle Moog-Koussa, Executive Director of the Bob Moog Foundation, reads from Bob’s foreword to Albert Glinsky’s “Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage”.