Building the Madeon Adventure Machine

The critically-acclaimed companion website for Madeon’s debut album Adventure (which we covered back in issue 35) was made by the creative studio wemakeawesomesh.it. In these two blog posts Syd Lawrence takes us behind the scenes of the audio aspects of their creation covering formats for gapless playback and how they synced the audio with the visuals. Keep an eye out for the 3rd instalment showing how they added support for the Novation Launchpad MIDI controller.

Serial communication using Web Audio

A great write-up of a very clever hack using the Web Audio API to transmit UART serial data to an Arduino at 9600 baud. Their hack reminded me of the MicIO.js project from issue 13, in that both authors talk about using audio channels of data as a way to avoid expensive or proprietary means of communication between browsers and smartphones.

Tone.js version 5 released

Yotam Mann has released the latest version of his excellent Tone.js library. Tone.js wraps up many of the features of the Web Audio API in interfaces that make it much easier to build applications. For example rather than worrying about the details of synchronising sounds at a specific tempo, Tone.js allows you to express timing in more musical terms such as BPM (beats per minute). New features in version 5 include

Web Audio Meetup in Philadelphia

Joining Berlin, London and New York, Philadelphia now has its own Web Audio meetup. If you can get to Philadelphia on July 19th you should.

MIDI file rendering in the browser

Wild Web Midi is a wavetable software synthesiser capable of playing MIDI files directly in the browser. It can render the MIDI file to an audio file, or playback in realtime (using the Web Audio API) and is based on the freepats software synth instrument collection.

Solarbeat

Solarbeat, from White Vinyl design studios, generates ambient music using the orbital periodicity of the planets in our solar system. By playing with the parameters of the generator, such as the tempo and musical scales, you can generate a wide range of sounds. It’s a remake of an earlier Flash-based application, ported to use the canvas and Web Audio APIs (I found Firefox would get redirected to the Flash version, so had to use Chrome to hear the new Web Audio-powered version).

Building a Realtime Music Sync Collaboration App With PubNub

PubNub is a hosted message storage and synchronisation solution for building collaborative applications. In this article they show how it can be used to power the backend of a collaborative Web Audio app.

Learning: Think DSP

I often get asked if I can recommend books to help learn digital signal processing. I wanted to call out Think DSP by Allen B. Downey (author of the excellent Think X series of books for O’Reilly). He teaches the concepts of signal processing from a programmers perspective, approaching topics such as spectral analysis, filtering, and the Fourier Transform from a practical, algorithmic point of view rather than a mathematical one. The exercises he develops are written using Python, but Downey doesn’t assume a large amount of familiarity with the language.

How I’d Redesign Sheet Music

A beautifully illustrated set of ideas from Alex Couch on the design of notation for music, and the piano in particular.