Karplus-Strong String Synthesis

In this blog post, Matthew Rahtz shows how to synthesise string sounds using the Web Audio API. He starts with a simple introduction into the physics of how guitars, for example, make sound using a series of interactive visualisations. He then gets into the Karplus-Strong algorithm itself, which is capable of generating an amazing variety of sounds from a simple set of principles. A great article.

Bringing Web Audio to Microsoft Edge

The developers of the next version of Microsoft’s new browser Microsoft Edge share their progress on an implementation of the Web Audio spec. They give an overview of the API and talk about the features they are currently working on.

Update: I’d said previously that Microsoft would not be supporting ScriptProcessorNode. One of their developers got in touch to say that that wasn’t the case, they will support it, but are keenly watching the developments with AudioWorker so they can properly deprecate when other browsers drop their support for ScriptProcessorNode.

SoundCite

A very useful, simple idea from the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, SoundCite allows you to directly “cite” a piece of audio within the flow of your text, making it easy for your readers to quickly hear something without the distraction of an embedded player. The demos on the project page explain it better than I can.

Fun with the Web Audio API

A collection of fun and informative Web Audio experiments implemented inside the Codepen ‘IDE in a browser’ environment.

Keith McMillen make music in the browser

With the recent release of the Web MIDI API in Google Chrome we are starting to see music instrument manufacturers experimenting with the API to provide their customers a richer and more connected experience. In this post, Keith McMillen the MIDI controller manufacturer, introduce the Web MIDI API, give some useful code snippets and outline some of its advantages to the rest of the industry.

AudioDrop

This handy library from Kyle Stetz allows the drag-and-drop loading and decoding of audio files into Web Audio AudioBuffer objects.

Raspberry PI as a Synthesiser

Phil Atkin has been optimising the 1st generation Raspberry PI for sound generation, turning it into a powerful real-time ‘analog’ and wavetable synth and sampler. Watching the demo on youtube is the best way to get a sense of how well this works, as at the moment the code isn’t available to run it yourself. But I’m looking forward to having a play when it is!