Introduction to Web Audio with Stuart Memo

In this free 11-part video course from ‘tuts+’ Stuart Memo introduces you to the Web Audio API and shows you how to add some simple sounds to a web site. Stuart is a fun and engaging teacher, and learning Web Audio lends itself to the video format - being able to see the code and hear the sounds it creates at the same time is very useful.

Game of Reich

Ben Taylor has cleverly combined Conway’s Game of Life with the minimalist aesthetic of Steve Reich. The music is derived from the positions of tiles on the grid, but the sound can be filtered using the envelope at the bottom. Simple, effective and surprisingly fun to play with. I’d have liked a bigger grid so I could try and build a gun!

Web Audio Recorder Node

This library provides a custom ‘node’ to allow you to record the output of a web audio node graph, and schedule the recording at a precise time in the future.

Machines learn to play Tabla

In this blog post Gaurav Trivedi explains how to train recurrent neural networks to learn the rhythms of the Tabla. The demonstrations sound very convincing to my untrained ear, and I also enjoyed learning about the informal notation system used to describe Tabla rhythms.

W3C Music Notation Community Group

The W3C have recently formed a community group to examine the feasibility of standardising music document formats for the web. Joe Berkovitz, who is heading up the group, has also shared his thoughts on why this is an important step forward for musicians who work on the web.

3D audio visualisations with three.js

The ‘dancing cube’ in this demo is created using the WebGL wrapper library three.js. The positions of the cubes are synced to the frequency and tempo of the music performed using a Web Audio Analyser node.

Synthesisers

No issue of Web Audio Weekly would be complete without some synthesiser-related links. This week, I enjoyed reading a long-form article from Rhodri Marsden on the recent re-invention of hackable synthesisers and how they relate to the modular synths of old.

The ‘Syntorial’ is an innovative approach to learning how to play and program synths which combines a tutorial series of lessons with a built-in soft synth. This might work really well as a Web Audio application too.