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, recently-introduced blog that’s tracking the development of music and audio in browsers:
MIDI API Editor’s Draft posted [html5audio.org]
They’ve been following some good news with the advancement of audio in the browser. (Even recently, audio capabilities have often fallen back to Flash even when the interface itself is built in another tool.) The Moog Google Doodle and Angry Birds each use HTML5 audio – albeit only on Google Chrome. (In other browsers, they fall back on Flash.) They also point to a post by Jens Nockert examining two competing APIs for audio in the browser.
It’s all still evolving, and the landscape remains somewhat fragmented. But for those of you with the right skills, that also means now is a good time to get involved to ensure that music making on the Web is as powerful and expressive as possible. Making our technology more musical seems a fundamental means of making it more human.