browser

Slowly but surely, the web audio API creeps toward being something that’s usable in more than one browser at a time. In the meantime, we get a glimpse of how generative music could be a part of what’s to come. It’s a long way from those horrid, looping audio files that plagued the Web in its heady 1990s adolescence. Today on Create Digital Motion, I look at the aesthetics of crowd-sourcing in work by Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk – and how the view of the significance of the crowd has changed over time. Substitute “music” for “motion,” and you’ll …

Hey, why the heck not? (CC-BY-SA) farnea. Imagine connecting to MIDI gadgets – inputs and outputs – and sequencing musical patterns from a browser. (As a developer, imagine doing that from JavaScript. As a user, imagine doing that right inside your browser window with a music app.) For now, such things exist only on a document, but they could be coming to a browser near you. Not bad for a standard that dates back to 1983. The W3C has a document up for discussion, for those of you technical enough to get involved: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/audio/raw-file/tip/midi/specification.html The news comes from an excellent, …

It starts as just another toy to play around with in a few minutes of distraction in your Web browser – as if the Web were short on distraction. But then, something amazing can happen. Like a musical Turing Test, you start to get a feeling for what’s happening on the other side. Someone’s stream of colored dots starts to jam with your stream of colored dots. You get a little rhythm, a little interplay going. And instead of being a barrier, the fact that you’re looking at simple animations and made-up names and playing a pretty little tune with …

If you’re looking to build your own instruments and effects and sequencers and play with patching, you really don’t want this software. No, seriously – while a fascinating, fun tech demo, something like the desktop Pd or Max is probably what you want. (As we saw earlier this week, Pd-extended just got much easier to use, and it’s free.) This makes sound, but it’s also buggy and in progress and likely more of interest to coders. Okay, now having scared off some people, let’s talk nerd-to-nerd for a second. Patchosaur, an open-source, GitHub-hosted project by BADAMSON, is nonetheless seriously cool, …

Now, tripping out to visuals while you listen to music doesn’t require a separate app. You can do it right in the browser. And this pretty proof of concept not only creates dancing 3D visuals: it also demonstrates just how much is possible with 3D browser capabilities, and how they could interact with music, suggesting much more to come. Los Angeles-based developer Felix Turner of Airtight Interactive shares The Loop Waveform Visualizer. Tested for use in Google’s Chrome, it’s powered by two cross-platform, cross-browser, HTML5-associated technologies, WebGL and the Web Audio API. Give it any MP3 (you can even drag …

Want to work on your coding chops, but get away from the slavery of your desk and your laptop? Want to stretch out on the couch – or the cramped confines of a bus or coach plane flight? (Hello, EasyJet!) We saw yesterday how you can work with your iPad and Processing, via Processing.js. Here’s another option. GLSL Studio, a tool which was already a fun way to play around with 3D coding, continues to grow. It’s a full-blown OpenGL ES 2.0 coding environment, running on … well, a full-blown OpenGL ES 2.0 3D platform, all in a wafer-thin tablet …

Want to work on your coding chops, but get away from the slavery of your desk and your laptop? Want to stretch out on the couch – or the cramped confines of a bus or coach plane flight? (Hello, EasyJet!) We saw yesterday how you can work with your iPad and Processing, via Processing.js. Here’s another option. GLSL Studio, a tool which was already a fun way to play around with 3D coding, continues to grow. It’s a full-blown OpenGL ES 2.0 coding environment, running on … well, a full-blown OpenGL ES 2.0 3D platform, all in a wafer-thin tablet …

Alexander Chen, he of Kinect hacks and subways turned to strings, is back with another string visualization. Built in the browser (an interactive version is available), this work makes a visual accompaniment to Bach’s First Prelude from the Cello Suites. If you read music notation fluently, you may find the score itself suffices, but even so, the math to make this work – and the dance of circles across strings – is compelling. Alex, whose day job is with Google’s Creative Lab, talks to us a bit about the mathematics and process. First, his description: baroque.me visualizes the first Prelude …

SodaSynth runs natively in Chrome. With soft synths a dime a dozen, how do you set yourself apart? Defying conventions is a pretty good start, and a team of developers who built the Mixxx open source DJ tool are doing just that. SodaSynth from Oscillicious is a soft synth with a different approach. With no effects and, surprisingly, no filters, SodaSynth is all about the oscillators. But apart from its ready-to-layer sound, the developers are also making their software run in new places: aside from a VST, there’s a version for HP’s defunct TouchPad and, more interestingly, the first major …

Imagine access to the power of the modern Web browser – the HTML5 Canvas, hardware-accelerated graphics via WebGL, animation, and more. Now imagine that instead of writing code to access that power, you can connect modules for graphical patching. Windows visualists may recognize the software VVVV. But whereas that tool was restricted to the capabilities of Windows, VVVV.js runs directly in a browser – any modern browser. There’s even (limited) mobile support, which should improve as mobile browsers more closely resemble desktop browsers. Let’s just say that again: you can now make sophisticated visual and animation creations, in 3D, using …