Issue 19

1st Web Audio Conference

IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), the music and acoustics research institute located in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, France, have opened the call for submissions for a Web Audio conference in 2015. As well as soliciting more technical or academic papers, they are also interested in demo and poster sessions, and are planning to organise a gig where performers use the Web Audio API or allow the audience to participate with devices. It’s the first conference of its kind, so it will be interesting to see the line-up when it’s announced. Submission is open now¹.

• http://wac.ircam.fr/

CoffeeCollider

CoffeeCollider is a SuperCollider-inspired live coding environment that supports many of the same noise generators and processing functions as SuperCollider but runs in the browser. The bundled examples are fun to play with, it takes a little while to figure out how to make real-time changes (select the whole function you’ve changed and hit ⌘-Enter on the Mac), but the system is powerful and quite responsive. The whole code is open source on Github too.

• CoffeeCollider Chord demo
• CoffeeCollider on Github

Tango Music Visualisations

A beautiful but simple visualisation of a tango piece (I think it might be a tango version of Nirvana’s Nevermind!) from Bruno Imbrizi. I like how the thickness of the lines change depending of the frequency content of the music - it works really when when the strings come in and they start to take the form of a violin bow.

• http://brunoimbrizi.com/experiments/#/08

Compress audio buffers with libvorbis.js and lago

Joe Sullivan has written libvorbis.js which is a emscripten port of the Vorbis compression library. It allows you to create ogg-format compressed audio from PCM buffers, such as you’d create using the Web Audio API’s BufferSource node, or from a users soundcard input using getUserMedia. This solves a major problem for creating music using the Web Audio API, as it allows creations to be moved across the network much more easily due to the reduced file size. libvorbis.js is a straight-forward port of the library, but Joe’s lago project allows you to use it for real applications by off-loading the compression to a background Web Worker where available.

• lago
• libvorbis.js

beeplay.js

Beeplay is a simple library to allow you to write out multi-part compositions using a simple syntax and have them rendered using the Web Audio API. It looks like it’d be a really nice way of including some music with a simple game, while avoiding the additional overhead of having the player download an audio file. There’s no documentation with the library, but the example is pretty self-explanatory. The music is rendered using generated BufferSource nodes - it might be a fun exercise to see if these could be replaced using the OscillatorNode.

• https://watilde.github.io/beeplay/

The greatest electronic albums of the 1950s and 1960s

Fact Magazine have compiled a list of early electronic music. Like many such lists, the angry comments from people who are disgusted that a certain album wasn’t include also provide a great source of additional recommendations.

• The greatest electronic albums of the 1950s and 1960s (/via @MoogFoundation)

Working Group are on the technical committee.