As with the Extensible Web Summit, we wrote some notes collaboratively. Here are the notes for the Web Audio Hackday!

We started the day with me being late because I took a series of badly timed bad decisions and that ended up in me taking the wrong untergrund lines. In short: I don’t know how to metro in Berlin in the mornings and I’m still so sorry.

I finally arrived to Soundcloud’s offices, and it was cool that Jan was still doing the presentations, so Tiffany gave me a giant glass of water and I almost drank it all while they finished. Then I set up my computer and proceeded to give my talk/workshop!

It was an improved and revised version of the beta-talk I gave at Mozilla London past past week:

Note to self: maybe remove red banners behind me if wearing a red shirt, so as not to blend with them

Sadly it wasn’t recorded and I didn’t screencast it either, so you’ll have to make do with the slides and the code for the slides (which includes the examples). Or maybe wait until I maybe run this workshop again (which I have already been asked to do!)

Jordan Santell and the Web Audio Editor in Firefox Devtools

Then Jordan (of dancer.js and component.fm fame) talked about the fancy new Web Audio Editor which is one of the latest tools to join the Firefox Devtools collection of awesome—and it just appeared in Firefox Stable (32) so you don’t even need to run Beta, Aurora or Nightly to use it! (I talked a bit about it already).

You can use the editor to visualise the audio graph, change values of the nodes and also detect if you have a memory leak when allocating nodes (which is something that is part of the normal workflow of working with Web Audio).

There was a nice plug to Are We Dubstep Yet?, the minisite I am building to keep track of bugs in the Web Audio Editor. Yay plugs!

Jordan’s slides are here. You can also watch his JSConf talk where he introduced an early version of the tools!

Chris Wilson and the Web MIDI API

Finally the mighty Chris Wilson explained how the Web MIDI API works and made some demos using a few and assorted MIDI devices he had brought with him: a keyboard, pads, a DJ deck controller…!

It’s interesting that most of the development of the Web MIDI implementation seems to be happening in Japan, so they are super original in their examples.

Chris’ slides on Web MIDI and other audio in general slides.

Hacking + Hacks!

I think we had lunch then… and then it was HACK TIME! But before actually getting started, some people pitched their idea to see if someone else wanted to collaborate with them and hack together. I think that was a really neat idea :-)

Myself, I spent the hack time…

• reconnecting with old acquaintances
• answering questions! but very few of them and none of them were the usual “but why doesn’t my oscillator start anymore?” but more interesting ones, so that was cool!
• asking questions! to Chris mostly–one cannot ask questions to a spec editor in person every day!
• and even started a hack which I didn’t finish: visualising custom periodic waves for use with an Oscillator Node, given the harmonics array. I gave myself the idea while I was doing the workshop, which is a terrible thing to do to myself, as I was distracting myself and wanted to hack on that instead of finishing the workshop. My brain probably hates itself, or me in general.

Also this was really cool:

.@cwilso and me feeling a tremendous relief at not being the only ones randomly causing our machines to emit weird sounds #webaudiohackday

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http://soledadpenades.com/2014/09/26/berlin-web-audio-hack-day-2014/