Generating music

You may or may not be aware of this, but HTML5 through the new JavaScript APIs enables browsers to act like sand boxed operating systems. Drawing functions and webgl with <canvas>, the joystick api, web sockets(a client-to-host HTTP extension), webRTC(Real-Time Communications), the full screen API, the cursor lock API, ... this list goes on and on. All of these things can be used for gaming, some in more obvious ways than others. This post  is about something I did with the Web Audio API.

It took about a week once I started, but I finally managed to get a primitive synthesizer. Eventually, I hope to make it able to play customized instruments, but for now we are stuck with a sine wave. I wish to thank Rachel Bell, who published the sheet music I used to test the synthesizer to her blog.

Styling HTML Media Inner Workings

The Problem

While on Stack Overflow I stumbled across a question(right here in case you are curious) about styling the HTML5 Audio Player's time text and track control. Intrigued, my first reaction was that it could not be done because the players are browser-dependent. As I looked deeper into the issue, my answers and comments failed to satisfy the person who asked the question. I became haunted by the question and devoted some time to finding the answer. Since Google Chrome is the most stable browser that I could find that supports the most HTML5 features, I focused almost exclusively on it, but occasionally used a less-stable Chinese webkit browser called Maxthon.