Recreating THX’s Deep Note in JavaScript with the Web Audio API

This is a sound that is familiar to many cinema-goers, the THX Ltd.’s “audio logo” Deep Note. Stuart Memo was asked to recreate it using the Web Audio API for last year’s JSConf EU, and in this blog post he shares the sound and the code used to create it. Stuart’s very prolific, and often creates interesting Web Audio experiments. He’s created a newsletter to share them: you should sign up.

RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis

This crazy article caught my eye over the break. Researcher’s have found a way to extract cryptographic keys using acoustic analysis of the high-pitched squeals our laptop computers make. The full paper has the fascinating details, but I’ll link to the summary page to save you an 8Mb download.

Pitch detection

A while ago Chris Wilson, developer evangelist at Google and all-round Web Audio good-guy, released a simple pitch detection demo using the Web Audio API. You’d use pitch detection to build a guitar tuner, for example. Pitch detection, especially in more complicated cases can get very difficult. In this post, Chris talks about how he improved his initial simple algorithm, and shares a lot of really useful tips for building Web Audio applications. Of particular interest is his advice on syncing animation with audio in our applications.

Metamath Music

Finally, it wouldn’t be Web Audio Weekly without something esoteric and MIDI-related. This time (via @andrewn), this article talks about the relationship between mathematical proofs and music. The author has derived musical pieces from automated analysis of mathematical proofs. Head the warning, however: “make sure your media player is set to a ‘piano’ sound and not an ‘electronic organ’ sound, otherwise it will sound horrible”.