Rain Today - your daily source of natural rain sounds

If you work in a busy office, you might have found yourself reaching for headphones to help deal with the constant background noise. While music works well to mask background sounds, it can be distracting. Some people advocate listening to white noise due to its broad range of frequencies. But listening to white noise for long periods is fatiguing. This application generates a natural sound of rain falling. To avoid becoming repetitive the app uses the Web Audio API to seamlessly blend different sounds together to create a different backdrop every day.

Submissions open for the 2nd International Web Audio Conference

Submissions are now open for talks, demos, tutorials, posters and live music events at the 2nd Web Audio Conference to be held next April in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. At the 1st conference in Paris earlier this year, there was a great mix of talks from developers and musicians as well as academics and I’m sure next year will be great too.

Smooth Fading in Web Audio

A common problem when working with the Web Audio API concerns parameter automation. Once you’ve scheduled a series of parameter changes for a node, you cannot reliably know what the current value of its parameter is at any point in time, as there is no facility for introspection of calculated parameters. This makes it hard to reverse of change the parameters in a smooth way. This library from Chinmay solves the problem by implementing the same parameter automation calculations as the scheduling methods in the Web Audio API and therefore to schedule new changes that will smoothly follow the scheduled ones.

Dynamic Sound with the Web Audio API in Microsoft Flight Simulator Arcade

A great write up from the Microsoft development team on how they used the Web Audio API to provide the sounds for their new game Flight Simulator Arcade. There’s some code samples showing how convolution can provide a realistic simulated acoustic environment, and how to use a Waveshaper node to simulate the effect of radio distortion on the cockpit instructor’s voice.

And in other Microsoft news, Windows 10 promises to ship with a fully overhauled audio and MIDI subsystem, which should improve performance and capabilities for desktop and Web Audio applications.

Web Audio Basics

A collection of small examples illustrating the basics of how to use the Web Audio API. A great idea from Kyle Stetz, who is looking for help and contributions.

Web Audio API auto-complete package for Sublime Text

If you do your Web Audio development in Sublime Text grab this set of auto-complete functions to make your life a whole lot easier. The completion dictionary is based on the latest editors draft of the spec.

Social Media InterFace For Music

A proof-of-concept project from Andrew Faraday showing how to build collaborative music-making experiences by combining social media inputs (such as from Twitter) and Web Audio.

Angular Synthesiser

A Web Audio synthesiser built using the angular.js framework. If you’re a fan of Angular, or have been meaning to learn more - this demo and its code might help.

Mentored Firefox Web Audio Improvements

If you’ve always wanted to contribute to Firefox, but didn’t know where to start, consider this improvement to the Web Audio API. The issue is mentored by Web Audio developer and W3C Web Audio specification editor Paul Adenot, and he offers to help newcomers to Firefox development get their first patch landed.

Artist seminar with Tyler Marenyi

A recording of a two-hour workshop with Tyler Marenyi (aka NGHTMRE) in which he covers many practical music production techniques (focusing on Ableton Live, but with applications elsewhere) and the realities of the music industry. The video is helpfully annotated so you can jump to specific points of interest.