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→Web Audio
The first presentation that will be described is Web Audio presented by David Humphrey. The presentation that David conducted was about the Web Audio API that will ship with Firefox 4. He is one of the key players in the development of the Web Audi API. Dave briefly talked about his work on processing.js, a JavaScript library that can be used to create images, animations, interactions, etc, without relying on Flash or Java based applets. He then mentioned people used processing to visualize data sets, which can be statistical data, video, or even audio data. This is what led into the work of the Web Audio API; a way to take audio data and visual it, or even drive applications based on audio signals. A large number of demos showing the capabilities/functionality of the Web Audio API were presented, making it a very interesting presentation. As Dave stated, “Part of our goal was to prove to the web, to prove to musicians, to artists, and so on, that JavaScript, can do real time audio manipulation.” Apparently many people had doubts about audio manipulation in JavaScript because they thought it would not be fast enough to do all the computations. Dave also mentioned the work with the Web Audio API kicked off a standards track with the W3C. Currently, the Web Audio API will only work with Firefox 4, but hopefully the standard will catch on, and it will be available on other browsers.
After the initial introductions about the Web Audio API, Dave dove right into presenting a bunch of demos that showcased the various features of the API. He started out with the basic HTML5 <audio> element. Eventually, he went over demos showcasing FFT, beat detection, inverted wave cancellation, stereo splitting and panning, IIR filters, biquad filters, sampling, and so on. It was pretty mind boggling that all of this audio manipulation was possible from a browser, even more so using JavaScript. Another important section of Dave’s presentation was how this Web Audio API can be used in conjunction with accessibility. The whole notion of being able to represent sound as something visual was presented. Someone who is not able to hear sound should still get a chance to experience it. What better way to do this then by creating visualizations? The Pocket full of HTML5 demo which used the Audio Data API was then shown. This demo took a song and let the user choose from different visualizations types. Dave also presented text to speech functionality that is possible by using the Audio Data API. The text to speech engine was interesting because the other text to speech engines I had experience with were fully fledged applications, requiring installation. The Audio Data API version however, allowed the same functionality to be run from a browser. The next demo which was Dave showcasing sxfr.js, a JavaScript library he created by porting the original sxfr code. The original sxfr application basically was used to generate random 8-bit sound effects, commonly found in older generation games. The user could select a base effect to use, explosion for example, then tweak various options to customize the sound effect to their liking. I found it amazing that Dave quickly and easily ported a whole application into JavaScript. I seriously did not think JavaScript was so powerful. Nearing the end of the presentation Dave showed a challenge to HTML5 that a Flash developer proposed that can be found here. If someone can recreate the flash button in HTML5 he would eat his Flash CDs. Well in response to the challenge, this demo was created. I seriously did not even know that was even possible in HTML5. It just goes to show you what great innovation will only come in the future. The last demo that was shown was called the Flight of the Navigator. It was created by Dave and a team of other people to showcase the new functionality that will be shipping with Firefox4 (Audio Data API, 2D/3D capabilities, etc). It also used live data from Twitter and Flickr to use in the demo. It There was seriously some pretty amazing stuff, based displayed. Based on the capabilities shown here, I guess a new plateau for web developers can be set if they have access to these new tools.
==Viewpoint on Open Source==
