The Viability of the Web Browser as a Computer Music Platform

Abstract

The computer music community has historically pushed the boundaries of technologies for music-making, using and developing cutting-edge computing, communication, and interfaces in a wide variety of creative practices to meet exacting standards of quality. Several separate systems and protocols have been developed to serve this community, such as Max/MSP and Pd for synthesis and teaching, JackTrip for networked audio, MIDI/OSC for communication, as well as Max/MSP and TouchOSC for interface design, to name a few. With the still-nascent Web Audio API standard and related technologies, we are now, more than ever, seeing an increase in these capabilities and their integration in a single ubiquitous platform: the Web browser. In this article, we examine the suitability of the Web browser as a computer music platform in critical aspects of audio synthesis, timing, I/O, and communication. We focus on the new Web Audio API and situate it in the context of associated technologies to understand how well they together can be expected to meet the musical, computational, and development needs of the computer music community. We identify timing and extensibility as two key areas that still need work in order to meet those needs.