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Guergana Tzatchkova
Guergana Tzatchkova

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Web Audio Berlin Meetup

For almost a year now I am co-organizing the Web Audio Meetup in Berlin with Attila Haraszti.

What is Web Audio?

Web Audio is a Javascript Api for the browser to develop sound-related applications / websites.

There are some libraries that abstract some parts of the Web Audio API and can be easier for beginners. areknawo has listed them in this article:

According to MDN Web docs:

The Web Audio API provides a powerful and versatile system for controlling audio on the Web, allowing developers to choose audio sources, add effects to audio, create audio visualizations, apply spatial effects (such as panning) and much more.

If you have been listening to sound projects on the browser that involve more than playing back files, most likely you've been using the Web Audio API.

Why a meetup

Having audio on the browser allows novel ways in which audio applications can be concieved due to the participatory and wide-spread nature of the Internet. Our intention by organizing this meetup is to offer a place where artists / developers can show the product of their experimentation with the API and get inspired.

We are always looking for presenters

If you are in Berlin and have an idea for a talk please write to us. You can present works in progress, your school projects, a fancy library. We are open to talks from both technical and creative perspectives. If you still don't have a project come to our meetup and get inspired. The Web is your Canvas!!!

Past editions

We have had very interesting talks this year so far:

Web Audio Meetup #10 - Visionary Noises

👁 Rafael da Silva: A Gift of Sound and Vision

This talk is a curious journey through signal processing on browser. Image and sound are arrays so let's invert things and hear a color! If a guitar pedal affects wave's characteristics how an image will look like if it passes through an overdrive pedal? Was David Bowie predicting how awesome would our APIs be in 1977 when "Low" was released?

https://twitter.com/rafael_sps
Article - A Gift of Sound and Vision

✅Christoph Guttandin: Using the Latest Features of the Web Audio API in Every Browser

About 4 years ago Christoph started a little project to polyfill some parts of the Web Audio API he needed the most. Nowadays standardized-audio-context brings an almost feature complete implementation of the latest spec to every major browser. It is covered by 1364 tests and uses 385 more tests to monitor the API surface of all supported browsers.

This talk is about the latest API changes and how they can be used today. But it will also cover how things are implemented behind the scenes and will explain why some fairly new concepts can't be implemented in a every browser without trade-offs. This talk will also hightlight some things which can only be achieved by using a polyfill like testing Web Audio code outside the browser or having reliable type definitions.

standardized-audio-context @ github
Chris Guttandin Website

🙌 Spencer Rudnick: Synth Kitchen

Web Audio provides a nice API for dynamically defining audio graphs, with AudioNodes acting as useful building blocks.

Synth Kitchen is a project with the goal of using internet software to make modular synthesis cheap and accessible. With plans to add support for external MIDI, the web app will eventually be able to integrate with a DAW or act as a standalone instrument.

synth.kitchen @ github
synth.kitchen/
youtube demo

Web Audio Meetup #9 - Distributed Sounds

🙌 Carlo Cattano: Popularsynth

Popularsynth is a collaborative proof of concept that uses web audio to synthesize sounds on any device. Each user gets a different role assigned on a locally running server. Made at the sonic code sessions at Spektrum as a project to learn about collaborative non invasive music making apps that can run on any device that can run a browser.

PopularSynth at github
Carlo Cattano @ Twitter

📈 Martin Guder: Blockchain Sound Synthesis

The talk will give a short overview of how to make music with cryptocurrency trade data, how the idea was born, how the sounds are generated and why prototyping with jQuery and vanilla Javascript is still a valid strategy today.

Martin Guder - Website
Martin Guder @ Twitter

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