Issue 20
Wavepot
Wavepot describes itself as a digital audio workstation, but it’s
really more of a flexible live-coding environment. It’s very slickly
implemented with a number of bundled examples, with the developers
requesting donations to help them build more. The code is closed
source, but I assume, like CoffeeCollider featured in the last issue,
that the generated samples are buffered into a scriptProcessorNode
for playback. The Web Audio API provides many native nodes which are
more efficient and achieve lower latency, and it would be interesting
to see in the future if some of these live coding environments decide
to take advantage of them.
Web Audio Editor in Firefox
We saw some sneaky previews of the new developer tools for Web Audio in previous issues of this newsletter, but Jordan Santell, developer of the tools on the Mozilla team, has now written up some more details over on their blog. The tools are already very useful and a lot of fun to play with, so its worth installing the FF32 preview to try them out.
Faust announces Web Audio support
Faust is a functional programming language explicitly designed for
implementing signal processing and audio applications. It is designed
to allow signal processors to be described in notation that is as
close to the underlying mathematics as possible. Faust is a compiled
language, and with the latest release the Faust team have announced
support for Web Audio as a compile target. The Faust compiler first
generates asm.js
code, which is a subset of JavaScript that can be
optimised efficiently by many JavaScript engines. This code is then
wrapped in a Web Audio scriptProcessorNode
, where it can then be
connected to the rest of a Web Audio graph. This opens up exciting
possibilities for educational applications with Faust, and plug-in
development.
Making Music Mobile with the Web (Google I/O)
A great presentation from Google I/O on the Web Audio API and how it
inter-connects with other emerging technologies, WebRTC and
getUserMedia
, from the developers of Soundtrap (who I featured back
in
issue 4).
Interactive timeline of synthesis
A very Web 1.0 timeline of the history of synthesis over on the Bob Moog foundation website, nevertheless packed full of interesting photos and anecdotes. Note: the history of synthesis seems to stop with the Minimoog in 1970!
- Timeline of Synthesis (/via @womensaudio)