Notes on Web Audio Hackday Singapore 2016

The last installment of notes from my DevFest Asia 2016 trip! Here's the official day website.

We did three brief presentations:

  • someone (I forgot his name, sorry 😳) introduced BandLab, which is an online service that lets you compose music and also collaborate on it, all together (a bit like "git but for music" except they didn't use "fork" because it can sound "funny"). Very interesting project, it was enlightening to hear the features that are available depending on specific platforms and limitations, and also how they do use real instruments in their user testing because this is more of a tool to help musicians, not a tool to replace them
  • Matt McKegg introduced the Web Audio node school workshop, for anyone who wants to learn Web Audio but doesn't know how / where to start
  • And I introduced the MediaRecorder API (here's an article I wrote), and an experiment I had built for this hackday
This hackday was small, and I didn't get to stay until the end to see the projects that people worked on, as I had to catch my flight to Australia, but it was good to catch up with Matt, Joshua and Chinmay and learn what they have been up to recently.

For example, Matt has been busy building Ferment, a sort of decentralised peer to peer website/app/service/whatever to share music from creator to creator. It's built with Electron, Scuttlebot and also WebTorrent—I find it super interesting! I have watched a few talks on all these concepts before but I hadn't really seen any application that "clicked" everything in place like this one. It's super exciting to consider that each time you listen to a song you're becoming another peer and can share it with more people, making the song way more accessible to more listeners. I am already using it, what about you?

Joshua has a folder full of Work-In-Progress projects so there's no point in me listing all of them---but he's recently been working on controlling the speed of videos using a bezier curve editor. He was super cool and tried to combine that with MediaRecorder but we found a bug, ooops! Here's the bug report 8-)

I also had the chance to talk to more local developers, and again I was terrible at catching names, but it was fun to see what other people are building with or using Web Audio for. Someone had built a sound board of silly sounds when she was bored with something else, someone else was using Pedalboard.js to experiment with applying live sound effects to the output of his electric ukulele without carrying a whole bunch of hardware with him.