Make your browser dance

24 ways “is the advent calendar for web geeks”, and each article explores something new and exciting from the world of web development. In this article Ruth John creates a visualisation using CSS animations and the Web Audio API. She goes into some depth on how to analyse the audio to extract timing information and then how to syncronise the visuals with the music. The resulting demo is visually simple, but very effective.

Octahedrone

Another visualisation synced to the audio using the Web Audio API. This one uses WebGL and generates all of the sounds in response to mouse clicks. I was quite impressed with how smooth and glitch-free the sound was, but it does require a fairly fast computer. The author Ehsan Ziya has some more demos on his site which are well worth checking out.

Listen Up! Binaural Sound

When positioning sound spatially using the Web Audio API, you can use the PannerNode. In it’s simplest form sound can be positioned by cross-fading the left and right stereo channels. But there are more sophisticated and realistic ways to achieve the effect. In this article Chris Pike of BBC R&D talks about the history of Binaural Sound, and some of the latest advances in the technology. While not Web Audio specific the article should give you some of the background you need to understand a bit more about how the “HRTF” option in the PannerNode is implemented.

Everything You Need to Know About playbackRate

In this post, Mark Boas talks about playbackRate, which is an option supported on HTML audio and video tags to adjust the playback speed. The cross-browser support is variable, and Mark explains how to use it and what level of support you can expect from the various browsers out there.

LiveCamp

TOPLAP is a collective who encourage and support live coding - the art form which combines performance and code. They’re organising an “informal summer camp” in 2014, which looks like a lot of fun.

Algorithmic Music subreddit

I’m interested in computer programmes which can generate music, and especially in bringing some of the class algorithmic music techniques to the web. This subreddit seems to have a high signal to noise ratio, and a lot of interesting links.