Tinysynth

Tinysynth is a complete implementation of the General MIDI instrument sets (including all those familiar presets from 90s keyboards: “slap bass”, “new age pad”, “gunshot” and friends). The really impressive thing here is that all of the instruments are synthesised using Oscillator nodes - not a single PCM sample has to be loaded. The demo page allows you to play some example tracks using multiple instruments. If you’re looking for a light-weight set of instruments to synthesise music, look no further.

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.

Stopping an Oscillator at Cycle Completion

A frequent problem developers face when first working with the Web Audio API is how to avoid the nasty click that occurs when you stop an oscillator. In this article Sebastian Zimmer takes a novel approach - why not calculate the time when the oscillator waveform naturally becomes silent (“crosses zero”) and stop it then? Along the way you’ll learn about basic calculations of waveforms in JS and how to start and stop Oscillators.

JSAmbisonics

Ambisonics is a technique for positioning sounds within a virtual environment. With the rise of Virtual Reality the technology is again coming into prominance. In this paper researchers from IRCAM in Paris and Aalto University in Finland explain what Ambisonics is and how it can be used in Web Audio applications using the JSAmbisonics library they developed and open-sourced as part of their research.

Web Audio Boilerplate

Sebastien Piquemal has put together this useful collection of code that smooths over the differences between browsers’ implementations of the Web Audio API - making it easier to build Web Audio applications that work across different browsers, OS’s and platforms.

Free sounds from the European Space Agency

The European Space Agency has recently made a huge number of images and sounds available in the public domain. If your next project needs a sound from another planet have a listen through their SoundCloud channel for inspiration.

Noisli

Noisli is an browser based background noise simulator with a difference - this one comes with a distraction-free text editor so you can block out the world and concentrate on your writing without leaving your browser tab.

Can you identify a formula for chart success?

For the BBC4 documentary “The Secret Science of Pop” BBC R&D helped the production team analyse music to determine whether there were characteristics of timbre, tempo, pitch and rhythm that could accurately predict chart success. See whether they succeeded by watching tonight’s documentary and read the details on their blog.

The Nintendo Gameboy had very restrictive audio hardware: 4 channels of audio, 2 of which could only contain square waves, one that could only make noise and the fourth that had a programmable waveform. Despite these restrictions composers were able to come up with some very sophisticated soundtracks for their games. In this article Jason M. Yu deconstructs the soundtrack of “The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening” showing how by using strong motifs, clever variations and a lot of creativity a classic game soundtrack was created.