Generative Music

A fantastic interactive slide deck by Tero Parviainen from a talk he gave at Loop Berlin. Tero dives into the history of generative music and explains how Steve Reich, Brian Eno, John Cage, Terry Riley and others built systems that generated music. And of course the whole thing is peppered with interactive, web-audio powered illustrations.

Save the date: Web Audio Conference 2018

The 2018 Web Audio Conference will be held from September 19th to the 21st in Berlin, Germany. Sign up to the newsletter or follow the twitter account for more details as they are announced.

AudioWorklet lands in Chrome Beta

The big news in Web Audio while I’ve been away has been the release of the first implementations of the long-awaited AudioWorklet node. AudioWorklet is a node type within the Web Audio API that allows developers to supply arbitrary JavaScript or WebAssembly code to process process audio on the audio rendering thread. In effect, allowing you to create your own custom nodes.

The implementation is available in Chrome Beta behind an experimental flag and to get you started the Chrome team have written a number of basic demos

If you want to learn more about the possibilities this opens up, Hongchan Choi of Chrome’s Web Audio team gave a in-depth talk at WebAudioPDX

Paul Adenot from Mozilla has been heavily involved in specifying the AudioWorklet implementation and you can follow the progress of the Firefox implementation on Bugzilla

The implementations are still experimental at this stage but early adopters are already starting to run with it and are creating some interesting experiments. In particular the webaudiomodules.org team have been working with Stéphane Letz, co-author of FAUST and Michel Buffa to propose a standardised way of writing “plugins” for Web Audio - a sort of VST for Web Audio. There’s a demo video showing a simulated DX7 synth, an Oberheim OBX, a FAUST zita_verb and several Web Audio plugins

Web Audio step sequencer

Garren Smith’s first Web Audio project is this cool chord step sequencer. Garren, if you’re reading, it’d be great to learn more about how you built it and to hear your thoughts on learning to use the Web Audio API!

Synth Master Tatsuya Takahashi On Engineering Fun

An interview with Tatsuya Takahashi from NPR on why real things that make noise are fun.