Explore the BBC sound of the 1960s with our 4 demos of Radiophonic equipment, built with the new Web Audio API standard.
Project in 2012
What we are doing
This project re-creates some of the near-mythical techniques and hardware from the time of the BBC radiophonic workshop, using the new Web Audio API developed under our stewardship at the W3C. The result is a demo site, complete with annotated code for people to learn and play with the API themselves.
Why it matters
Our prototype demonstrates the potential of the new API by showing how audio can be generated and manipulated in a web browser, without the help of any plugin. It was important for us to create a demo that would be both educational, and fun - using the beloved theme of the radiophonic workshop meant that audio enthusiasts around the world would pay attention.
Our Goals
Our team has been involved in the W3C audio activity, participating in an effort to bring open, standard technology to process and synthesise audio on the web.
In March 2012, when we started this project, there had been a lot of interesting progress on on draft specifications and early implementations, and we felt it was time to start playing with the emerging APIs. There were already many demos showing what can be done with the draft technologies, yet we felt there was room for us to build something which would not only help show the capabilities of these APIs, but could also feed into the standardisation work by revealing gaps in features, by gathering impressions of working on some less-used sections of the specs, and perhaps even by stretching the implementations enough to raise flags about performance.
Outcomes
We presented the prototype at several events, both internal to the BBC and external (Google Protothon, AES Audio for Games conference). When we released it publicly on the web, it generated a fair amount of enthusiastic coverage, from tech blogs such as Wired Webmokey to stars such as Rachel Maddow or Wil Wheaton.
How it works
We wrote a Blog post on how the 4 demos were built using the Web Audio API in javascript.
