Mubert: algorithmically generated music

Mubert creates an endless playlist of listenable electronic music in various styles including ambient, trap, deep house and trance. Being entirely computer generated the music is naturally somewhat generic-sounding but impressively orchestrated and listenable. I can see this application working great as interruption-blocking background music, or as part of a royalty-free soundtrack.

Charanga seek full-time web audio developer

Charanga is recruiting a full-time web audio javascript developer to work in its Brighton, UK, seaside office (no remote work, sorry!). Salary up to £38.5K depending on experience. Closing date for applications is March 5th, 2017.

They operate over 100 websites, a couple of iOS/Android apps, a PC, Mac and Linux desktop app and a suite of music education apps, all built with HTML, CSS and javascript.

Charanga is used in more than 6500 schools in the UK, by tens of thousands of teachers and pupils, and we are currently expanding globally.

Building web-audio applications to support curriculum, instrumental and electronic music-teaching in the classroom, your initial projects will be a secondary school composition and vocal recording application, and a music-theory training application.

Fastidious Envelope Generator

It’s surprisingly difficult to create classic attack-decay-sustain-release (ADSR) envelopes using parameter automation in the Web Audio API. If you don’t take care to consistently ramp gain to zero then pops and clicks can occur; scheduling all of the parameter changes needed for an envelope at an arbitrary point in the future is also a complex book-keeping exercise. This library abstracts away these implementation details and provides you instead with a higher-level interface for declaring parameter envelopes. A welcome addition to the Web Audio toolkit.

Clubber - audio reactive visualizations

Clubber is a JavaScript library that takes the hard work out of creating synced visualisations of audio. Connect the clubber node to another audio node in your Web Audio application and you can periodically request a variety of measures of the sound - for example the average energy of all active notes or a power-weighted average MIDI index. The github page for the library links to some fantastic demos.

Book: JavaScript for Sound Artists

This new book from William Turner and Steve Leonard looks interesting. It hasn’t been published yet, and I haven’t read a copy, but the table of contents promises a full-introduction to programming in JavaScript for non-programming artists followed by a tour of the features of the Web Audo API.

DrumIt - create your own drum beats

A fun grid-sequencer drum machine application with a variety of sample acoustic and electronic drum kits. You can save the patterns you come up with and export them as WAV files.

Tonehack

Tonehack is an exploration in timbre - how the tonal qualities of a sound can vary so much even when the pitch stays the same. It puts you in control of each harmonic of the sound by allowing you to draw the volume and pitch envelopes and how they vary with time. A large variety of presets helps to illustrate the theory.

99% Invisible: The Evolution of Architectural Acoustics

The history of the study of reverberation covered beautifully in this 20min podcast episode and show notes from the 99% Invisible team.