Web Audio Meetups in London and New York

I’ve been talking to a few Web Audio enthusiasts in London about organising a meetup for us to share presentations, demos, code and good times with each other. If that sounds interesting to you, you have something to present, would like to attend or can offer a venue or sponsorship, please send me an email or a tweet for more information. When we’ve organised a date and time we’ll let you all know!

In the meantime, if you’re in New York in March, Splice are hosting a “Web Audio Show and Tell” at their offices on 20th street. It sounds like it’ll be a great event, and I look forward to hearing about what was shown!

Birdsongs, Musique Concrète, and the Web Audio API

Using a combination of crowd-sourced field recordings and knowledge of your location Brian Belet and Bill Walker have created an application that creates soundscapes consisting of layers of birdsongs. The authors describe their use of various sources of data and the Web Audio API in a writeup on the Mozilla blog.

What’s new in Web Audio in Firefox 37/38

If you’re not tracking the small changes to the editors’ draft of the Web Audio API, I don’t blame you! Fortunately, Soledad Penadés and Chris Mills have, and in this article they give an overview of the latest additions to Firefox’s Web Audio API support. The Firefox team have implemented some of the latest changes to the specification and including the new, simpler StereoPannerNode and promise-based versions of common Web Audio API calls.

Pentaphone

A lot of the online tools for making music that we’ve talked about in the past in this newsletter are very complicated. They often require you to already understand how real-world synthesisers or computer music techniques work before making something that sounds good. In this demo Bill Gathan has taken an alternative approach. By restricting your musical choices to notes from a pentatonic scale, almost any combination of chords and notes sounds great!

Bill is also combining React.js, Facebook’s innovative javascript framework, with the Web Audio API. There’s a lot of things to learn from this demo.

Web Looper

Web Looper is a loop-based performance tool. It records sounds from your microphone (using the getUserMedia API), loops them and allows you to layer up the loops into a composition. There’s some simple effects you can apply and interestingly it features “rooms” where you can listen to other people’s experiments built using WebRTC. The code is open source, so it’s also a good example of how you can connect all of these technologies together.

Babylon.js v2.0

Babylon.js is a 3D game engine built using javascript and WebGL. It has just reached the 2.0 milestone, and with the new release the developers have added an audio engine using the Web Audio API. The tutorial on the Babylon.js documentation site gives a good overview of its capabilities. They’ve decided not to offer any fall-back support for browsers that do not support Web Audio which is a good indication of the level of support the API enjoys now in many browsers.