[whatwg] Codecs for <audio> and <video>

[Sam Dutton]

As an aside to Chris McCormick's comments, I wonder if it might also be useful/possible/appropriate (or not) to provide access to media data in the way that the ActionScript computeSpectrum function does: 

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/media/SoundMixer.html#computeSpectrum%28%29

Sample visualization using Canvas with computeSpectrum: http://www2.nihilogic.dk/labs/canvas_music_visualization/

Sam Dutton

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Message: 1
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2009 11:16:01 +1000
From: Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Codecs for <audio> and <video>
To: Chris McCormick <chris at mccormick.cx>
Cc: whatwg at lists.whatwg.org
Message-ID:
<2c0e02830908081816v74711d64ya72c8cc11550baa4 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 3:15 AM, Chris McCormick<chris at mccormick.cx> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 09:24:42AM -0700, Charles Pritchard wrote:
>> There are two use cases that I think are important: a codec
>> implementation (let's use Vorbis),
>> and an accessibility implementation, working with a <canvas> element.
>
> Here are a few more use-cases that many people would consider just as
> important:
>
> * Browser based music software and synthesis toys.
> * New types of 'algorithmic' music like that pioneered by Brian Eno.
> * Browser based games which want to use procedural audio instead of
> pre-rendered sound effects.
>
> I'd like to reiterate the previously expressed sentiment that only implementing
> pre-rendered audio playback is like having a browser that only supports static
> images loaded from the server instead of animations and <canvas> tags.
>
> What is really needed is a DSP vector processor which runs outside of ECMA
> script, but with a good API so that the ECMAscripts can talk to it directly.
> Examples of reference software, mostly open source, which do this type of thing
> follow:
>
> * Csound
> * Supercollider
> * Pure Data
> * Nyquist
> * Chuck
> * Steinberg VSTs
>
> I am going to use the terms "signal vector", "audio buffer", and "array"
> interchangeably below.
>
> Four major types of synthesis would be useful, but they are pretty much
> isomorphic, so any one of them could be implemented as a base-line:
>
> * Wavetable (implement vector write/read/lookup operators)
> * FM & AM (implement vector + and * operators)
> * Subtractive (implement unit delay from which you can build filters)
> * Frequency domain (implemnt FFT and back again)
>
> Of these, I feel that wavetable synthesis should be the first type of synthesis
> to be implemented, since most of the code for manipulating audio buffers is
> already going to be in the browsers and exposing those buffers shouldn't be
> hugely difficult. Basically what this would take is ensuring some things about
> the audio tag:
>
> * Supports playback of arbitrarily small buffers.
> * Seamlessly loops those small buffers.
> * Allows read/write access to those buffers from ECMAscript.
>
> Given the above, the other types of synthesis are possible, albeit slowly. For
> example, FM & AM synthesis are possible by adding adding/multiplying vectors of
> sine data together into a currently looping audio buffer. Subtractive synthesis
> is possible by adding delayed versions of the data in the buffer to itself.
> Frequency domain synthesis is possible by analysing the data in the buffer with
> FFT (and reverse FFT) and writing back new data. I see this API as working as
> previously posted, by Charles Prichard, but with the following extra
> possibility:
>
> <audio id='mybuffer'>
> buffer = document.getElementById("mybuffer");
> // here myfunc is a function which will change
> // the audio buffer each time the buffer loops
> buffer.loopCallback = myfunc;
> buffer.loop = True;
> buffer.play();
>
> Of course, the ECMA script is probably going to be too slow in the short term,
> so moving forward it would be great if there was a library/API which can do the
> following vector operations in the background at a speed faster than doing them
> directly, element by element inside ECMAscript (a bit like Python's Numeric
> module). All inputs and outputs are signal vectors/audio tag buffers:
>
> * + - add two signal vectors (2 input, 1 output)
> * * - multiply two signal vectors (2 input, 1 output)
> * z - delay a signal vector with customisable sample length (2 input, 1 output)
> * read - do a table lookup (1 input, 1 output)
> * write - do a table write (2 input, 1 output)
> * copy - memcpy a signal vector (1 input, 1 output)
> * fft do a fast fourier transform - (1 input, 2 output)
> * rfft do a reverse fast fourier transform - (2 inputs, 1 output)
>
> It would be so great if it was possible to unify the above into an API that
> looked and worked something like this:
>
> <audio id='mybuffer'>
>
> outbuffer = document.getElementById("mybuffer");
>
> b = new AudioBuffer(64)
> for (x=0; x<64; x++)
> ? ? ? ?b[x] = Math.sin(x / 64 * Math.PI)a;
>
> // inside the loopCallback do a vector multiplication of the data in our buffer
> // with a sine wave we created earlier.
> outbuffer.multiply(b);
>

Why don't you just implement an example in javascript to show off what
you're talking about and make a use case for having it implemented
inside the browsers?

Cheers,
Silvia,

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