[whatwg] Audio synthesis

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, Charles Pritchard wrote:
>
> Use a sound of varying pitch to hint to a user the location of their 
> mouse (is it hovering over a button, is it x/y pixels away from the edge 
> of the screen, how close is it to the center).
> 
> Alter the pitch of a sound to make a very cheap midi instrument.
> 
> Pre-mix a few generated sounds, because the client processor is slow.
> 
> Alter the pitch of an actual audio recording, and pre-mix it, to give 
> different sounding voices to pre-recorded readings of a single text. As 
> has been tried for "male" "female" sound fonts.
> 
> Support very simple audio codecs, and programmable synthesizers.

Cool, thanks, I've noted these in the spec's source. I think some of these 
would indeed justify adding an API in the next versions of the language.


On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Philip Jagenstedt wrote:
> 
> For all of the simpler use cases you can already generate sounds 
> yourself with a data uri. For example, with is 2 samples of silence: 
> "data:audio/wav;base64,UklGRigAAABXQVZFZm10IBAAAAABAAEARKwAAIhYAQACABAAZGF0YQQAAAAAAAAA".
> 
> It might be worthwhile implementing the API you want as a JavaScript 
> library and see if you can actually do useful things with it. If the use 
> cases are compelling and require native browser support to be performant 
> enough, perhaps it could go into a future version of HTML.

A JS library attempting to do this would definitely be helpful in 
determining how much need there is for this.

-- 
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