Pink Trombone: Real-time vocal synthesis

Explore how human beings sing and talk with this amazing visualisation. Move the virtual tongue, control the hard and soft pallet, vary the size of the nasal cavity and alter the pitch of the voice box to create a huge range of convincing vocal sounds.

Recreate 8-bit game music with the Web Audio API

Greg Hovanesyan was inspired by a The 8-Bit Guy’s YouTube videos (which I linked to in the last edition of Web Audio Weekly) and took on the challenge to recreate some classic 8 Bit music using the Web Audio API. The details of the simple 4-channel synths are fascinating, as is the process Greg took to convert MIDI files to JSON for rendering with the synth.

Web Audio Inspector

Google’s new Web Audio Inspector is now available on the Chrome web store. The extension adds a panel to Chrome Developer Tools that lets you inspect the live web audio graph of a web page. The parameters of each audio node can be Inspect properties of AudioNodes by clicking them. More information is available on Github under the Google organisation.

Polyphonic Web Audio Synth

A great-sounding polyphonic (it plays multiple notes at the same time) synthesiser with a range of built in presets.

Deadline extension for Web Audio Conference

If you were planning to submit a paper or talk proposal to this year’s Web Audio Conference (to be held August 21-23, 2017 at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London) not that the deadline for submissions has been extended. You now have until April 7th to submit, and up to the 14th to finish up your submission. The submission process might be a bit unfamiliar to some of you as it is modelled on processess used frequently for academic conferences. The last two conferences have had many submissions from developers and musicians though, so you should feel free to submit anything you think might be interested to the community.

The best music pens on CodePen

CodePen is an interactive environment for developing and sharing JavaScript apps. This blog post has a roundup of some of the best Web Audio-based experiments on the site.

Peter Frazer’s Web Audio experiments

A collection of Web Audio examples of various synthesis techniques including Additive, subtractive and FM synthesis.

Sawtooth

Sawtooth is a web application for recording, editing and storing sounds. You can build up and manage a private library of your own sounds, or share them with collaborators.

Demonstrations of Web Audio tube amplifier synthesis

Michel Buffa has been working for a long time on a very detailed tube amplifier simulator using Web Audio. Michel has been testing the amp and performing some experiments to compare it to some more common hardware and software amps. You can get a sense for how well his amplifier simulator works in this demo on YouTube.

node-web-audio-api looking for a new maintainer

Sébastien Piquemal started work on an implementation of the Web Audio API in Node.js. The aim of this project is to allow the same API for to be used on both the client and the server. He’s looking for a new maintainer to push the project forward - if you’re interested in learning more about how the API is implemented under the hood, this would be a great project to contribute to.

Build a music visualizer

A fantastic tutorial on how to build visualisations of sound using WebGL and Web Audio.

Bi-directional step sequencer

Step sequencers usually work in a single direction - modelling time as flowing from left to right on the screen. With a simple twist this demo turns the sequencer into a grid. It’s surprising how quickly interesting cross-rhythms can be programmed using this interface.

Creating dance music with JS & Node.js

A very interesting talk from Walmik Deshpande. This project doesn’t actually use the Web Audio API - rather, Walmik shows how MIDI events can be generated programmatically using a Node.js application and then hooks these events into Ableton to handle the synthesis. The takeaway here is that for many musical tasks it can be more intuitive to think in terms of simple programming concepts - loops, random number generation and so on - and to use those programs to create elements of a composition in a more traditional interface.