Web Audio Processing: Use Cases and Requirements

I am pleased to see the work on this topic  [1].

 

The use cases seem to lack something that, in my mind, is rather
fundamental: the ability to create sounds ex nihilo.  In the 1980's Mac
users had access to a pretty little program called SoundEdit [2]  that
allowed one, using SVG-like shapes (though I don't recall that we called it
SVG back then) to create waveforms that were then converted to simple
sounds. A sine wave of a particular frequency might correspond to a pure
tone. Waveforms could be combined to create timbre, so that voices could be
created. Throughout the document, I see lots of references to using
pre-recorded sounds, stored as little "auditory bitmaps" somewhere, but
nowhere that a composer could construct the primitive sounds herself.

 

I think I might not be the only person interested in such.  Ray Cromwell's
blog [3], mentioned at [4], points out an inability of HTML5 audio: "you
cannot synthesize sound on the fly."

 

Perhaps this is at the core of people's thinking already and that it has,
accordingly, been so obvious as to elude mention. Perhaps I've missed it in
my perusal of the use cases (apologies, if so - it would not be the first
time I've misread such things).  In my own shallow and brief
experimentations with computer generated music over the past 4 decades, the
generation of primitive sounds would seem to be important to the group's
efforts.

 

I would suggest that something like InkML with SMIL and a <path>-like
element that has PostScript-like loops, recursions, reversals,
transpositions and the like would go a long way once the composer can create
(or borrow) a set of notes and voices.

 

Regards

David

 

[1]
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/audio/raw-file/tip/reqs/Overview.html#music-creation-
environment-with-sampled-instruments

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundEdit 

[3]
http://cromwellian.blogspot.com/2011/05/ive-been-having-twitter-back-and-for
th.html 

[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-audio/2011AprJun/0041.html