Hello!

I hope you enjoy this week's newsletter. I've included a couple of Web Audio apps and tutorials and also some pointers for getting involved with the future development of the Web Audio and WebCodec APIs.

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-- Chris

Building a delay effect with the Web Audio API

TOM HAZLEDINE

A wonderful interactive Web Audio API tutorial that covers more than its title suggests. As well as demonstrating how to create delay effects, the article also shows how to synthesise notes, quantise them to musical scales, and design their sound. Each snippet of code is accompanied by an interactive widget and spectrum plot.

WebCodecs proposal

W3C

The WebCodecs specification is a proposal to allow encoded video and audio to be decoded in the browser. From an audio point of view the aim is to have a Web Audio-interoperable API that uses separate threads to decode the audio and can therefore handle multiple simultaneous decodes. The authors are looking for feedback from the developer community, so take a look at the proposed spec and make any suggestions in the issue tracker.

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Priority features for the Web Audio API

W3C

The W3C Audio Working group has some priorities for future improvements to the Web Audio API. They're looking for input from developers, so this is a great opportunity to shape the future of the API. Of particular interest at the moment are proposals to:

• Expose AudioBuffer to DedicatedWorker
• Preemptively determine audio thread overload
• Allow user-selectable render quantum size
• Detect when a user is using headphones

If those or any of the priority-1 issues are of particular importance to you, or you have relevant knowledge that may help, use the Github issues to start a conversation.

Mididorians

ARJUN GADHIA

A fun Web MIDI game to help you learn piano chords.

Scribbletune

WALMIK DESHPANDE

Scribbletune is a Node.js module that allows you to create MIDI files using JavaScript. The library can also be used on the web, where it renders the MIDI files to sound using Web Audio. You can also use it in Ableton thanks to its Max For Live integration.

Making Looking for Nigel - our tips for creating audio AR experiences

HENRY COOK

Looking for Nigel is an experimental Augmented Reality experience from the BBC's R&D team. In this blog post the team share some lessons they've learnt from developing the experience. While not Web Audio-specific the recommendations apply to any audio AR application.

Who is Heinrich Schenker and why should you care?

ETHAN HEIN

A fascinating explanation of some recent controversy surrounding the music theorist Heinrich Schenker.

Whether or not Schenker gets canceled, I really don’t care. I’m much more concerned about all those artists and traditions who are preemptively canceled by their exclusion from the curriculum, and who mainstream theorists consider to be beneath their notice.

Ethan Hein's blog is full of articles about progressive music theory, music education and hip hop. I encourage you to dig in. It is also home to the brilliant Groove Pizza application.