Web Audio Tech
Did you come across digital clipping in web audio apps? I certainly did several times (mostly in my own apps though). This undesired effect occurs when you play several sound sources at the same time, which results in a signal that is louder than the maximum of 0 dBFS. Since a digital system is unable to reproduce higher amplitudes, you will hear nasty distortion and get an unworthy waveform looking like this:
I just wanted to mention that I did this thing called Beatsketch last year. It lets you make music on the web without having to know much about making music.
BeatSketch from Sebastian Zimmer is a collaborative music production tool that Sebastian developed for his Master’s degree in Computer Science. A song consists of multiple tracks, and each track is backed by a grid-based sequencer. Any changes you make are synchronised between connected collaborators immediately. It also supports mixing the final song down to a WAV file for downloading. An impressive set of features and a very useful exploration of possible methods of implementing collaborative working.
Chris Lowis on Web Audio Weekly #43
Has anybody created an emoji keyboard that’s actually a piano keyboard for writing musical notation? Wanted a quick way to tweet a melody.
— AudioGrains (@AudioGrainsBlog) 5. Januar 2016
Inspired by @AudioGrains tweet, I made this little Emoji Piano.
Emoji Piano lets you create simple melodies and encodes them with Unicode emojis which you can share and tweet.
Lissajous curves are fun. And who doesn’t dream of standing right inside one all the time? The boys from Tame Impala certainly do, because some of their concert’s light shows consisted of little else than Lissajous curves:
When I was at one of their shows, I actually saw how they put a camera in front of an old analogue oscilloscope in a corner of the stage to capture them.
WebVR now makes it possible to fully immerse in these curves.
THREE.js developer Mr.doob has posted an important comment on this.
WebVR matters. And the great WebVR Boilerplate by Boris Smus allows to get started with it immediately.
Playing around with it, I got the idea to use the Web Audio API to spatialize the sound of an object within the matrix, so that a person wearing a headphone could not only see, but also hear where an object is located.
Since the Web Audio API is great, you can do that with ease.
Inspired by this article (German), I decided to build a kitchen radio from my old cell phone and some car speaker last year. Here’s how it turned out, combined with an instruction.
I fell in love with synthesized bass sounds when listening for the first time to Joan as Police Woman’s performance of Holy Fire on Later:
After that I enthusiasticly tried to recreate this sound with the awesome Moog emulator Monark by Native Instruments.
Monark comes already with some quite good presets. Here you can download the one I have created to come as close to Joan’s bass sound as possible. It’s based on the preset “Humble Bee” but with tiny adjustments:
Currently, I’m doing some XML manipulation and transformation in the web browser. I have encountered some obstacles, tips and thoughts that I want to share with you.
I bought a record at HDtracks to see if it has any benefits in contrast to CD-like audio files at a sample rate of 44,1 kHz and a bit depth of 16. I want to share my findings with you.