Acid Machine 2

Acid Machine is an integrated music production environment featuring a sequencer hooked up to some classic-sounding emulations of TB-303 synths and a drum machine with a full set of retro-sounding samples. If you’ve ever used Rebirth from Propellerhead this arrangement will be very familiar to you. The app feels solid and intuitive (especially if you have familiarity with the machines/software it is emulating). An interesting feature is the availability of a paid-for Electron powered desktop version which can load Rebirth .RBS files. I also love the implementation of a MIDI “learn” mode to map controller signals to the knobs and buttons of the virtual tools…. now I just need to make a nice MIDI controller to play with it!

Web Audio Designer - a GUI for building Web Audio node graphs

Web Audio Designer allows you to specify the nodes, connections and parameters of a Web Audio graph using a GUI. You can preview what a graph will sound like using the play buttons on each node, and even provide some basic controller elements to test interactions and parameter choices. An incredibly useful feature is the ability to export the graph you have built as JavaScript ready to edit and incorporate into your application. If I could have anything else it would be an “oscilloscope” node to help visually debug parts of the graph.

Comet

Comet is a web synthesiser with an experimental interface. It features a double oscillator with 5 waveform, detune and gain mix each, filters, customizable effects all wrapped up in a colourful animated interface.

Audio User Experience explorations from Codrops

Codrops is a web design and development blog. Musical Interactions explores how mouse gestures and other user interactions can be mapped to audio. There’s a lot of different ideas here and the code is available on Github if something inspires you.

W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is a rapidly emerging technology that is being explored both on and off the web platform. On the web the challenge of positioning audio in the same virtual space as the visual is being tackled using Web Audio - notably through Google’s Omnitone project. This report from a recent W3C workshop gives a broad overview of the state of the art of VR on the web.

Don’t Just Mix

Another inspiring Chrome Experiment - this time from Chi Zeng who has built an impressive multi-channel digital audio workstation (DAW). All the features you’d expect are here - including multi-channel recording and playback, an effects bus, solo and muting of channels and non-linear editing of the audio.

webmusic-icons

A set of public domain icons that you can use in your audio projects. Featuring a variety of synths, microphones, instruments and connectors.

A Brief Survey of Sound Art

A fantastic overview of the history of sound art from the avant garde ambient of the early 1900’s to the experiments of contemporary artists today.