Link tags: sounds

Notes on synthetic speech - Tink - Léonie Watson

This is a fascinating deep dive by Léonie on the inner workings of speech synthesis. She has quite a conundrum: she wants fast playback, but she also wants a voice that doesn’t sound robotic. Unfortunately it’s the robotic-sounding voices that work best at speed.

If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend listening to (or reading) the accessibility episode of the Clearleft podcast which featured Léonie as a guest giving demos and explanations.

Centuries of Sound

An audio mix for every year of recorded sound, 1859 to the present.

Currently up to 1936.

CTS - conserve the sound

An online museum of sounds—the recordings of analogue machines.

JavaScript Systems Music

A massively in-depth study of boundary-breaking music, recreated through the web audio API.

1. Steve Reich - It’s Gonna Rain (1965)
2. Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports, 2/1 (1978)
3. Brian Eno - Discreet Music (1975)

You don’t have to be a musician or an expert in music theory to follow this guide. I’m neither of those things. I’m figuring things out as I go and it’s perfectly fine if you do too. I believe that this kind of stuff is well within reach for anyone who knows a bit of programming, and you can have a lot of fun with it even if you aren’t a musician.

One thing that definitely won’t hurt though is an interest in experimental music! This will get weird at times.

Form Validation with Web Audio | CSS-Tricks

An interesting idea from Ruth—using subtle sounds to augment inline form validation.

There aren’t any extremely established best practices for this stuff. The best we can do is make tasteful choices and do user research. Which is to say, the examples in this post are ideas, not gospel.

Open Access at ESA

Images, videos, sounds, and 3D models are now available from the European Space Agency under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license.

Introducing Soundslice offline mode | The Soundslice Blog

Adrian documents how he’s using Service Workers on Soundslice. I could imagine doing something similar for The Session.

Museum of Endangered Sounds

Sounds from our collective technological past.

(I’ll look past the fact that the sound labelled “ZX Spectrum” is using an image of an Amstrad PCP 464)

Soundslice: Tabs have never sounded so good

A lovely new service from Adrian that allows you to sync up guitar tabs with videos. It’s a very impressive in-browser app.

Dance Yrself Clean - LCD Soundsystem - Muppets rock out in Brighton ! - YouTube

A trifecta of nice things:

1. Muppets.
2. Brighton.
3. LCD Soundsystem.