Issue 77
Friday night is music night remixed
For a special performance of film music broadcast by BBC Radio 2, BBC R&D created a prototype that allows the listener to ‘zoom in’ on sections of the orchestra. A total of 4 individual mixes of the recording were made and by zooming in on the video, the balance between the four is changed - this allows you to hear the strings, brass, woodwind or percussion in more detail.
Charanga seek full-time web audio developer
Charanga is recruiting a full-time web audio javascript developer to work in its Brighton, UK, seaside office (no remote work, sorry!). Salary up to £38.5K depending on experience. Closing date for applications is March 5th, 2017.
They operate over 100 websites, a couple of iOS/Android apps, a PC, Mac and Linux desktop app and a suite of music education apps, all built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Charanga is used in more than 6500 schools in the UK, by tens of thousands of teachers and pupils, and we are currently expanding globally.
Building web-audio applications to support curriculum, instrumental and electronic music-teaching in the classroom, your initial projects will be a secondary school composition and vocal recording application, and a music-theory training application.
- charanga.com/jobs (sponsored link)
Clubberize
Clubber is a library for the visualization of sound using frequency analysis. It abstracts away a lot of the complexity in building this kind of application. Clubberize wraps a lot of the code in a modular way that makes it easy to use in your own projects.
In brief
- Moire: A Web Audio / WebGL visualisation
- Experimenting with
speechSynthesis
: A brief introduction to the speech synthesis API. - Work with groups of sounds in pizzicato.js: This update to the popular
pizzicato.js
library allows you to group multiple samples together and work with them at the same time. - Audible Visuals: A collection of music visualisations based on the Archimedean spiral.
- DbMaj7: A tool to help musicians understand the relationship between chords and scales.
Web Audio benchmarks
A suite of benchmarks designed to test the performance of “native” Web
Audio code against various other methods of synthesising sound -
including ScriptProcessorNode
in the main thread, on a worker thread
and using WebAssembly
. This type of benchmark should be very useful
when ScriptProcessorNode
is eventually replaced with an
AudioWorklet
node.
Online tone generator
A simple pure-tone generator - useful for tuning instruments, simple science experiments and testing audio equipment (including your own ears!)
BEEP: A documentary history of game sound
An award-winning documentary about the musicians, sound designers and programmers that have contributed to the history of computer game music. The full documentary is available to buy, but there’s a trailer and a series of “webisodes” (full, unedited interviews) available for free.