A couple of weeks ago, I started digging into the Web Audio API. Initially, I was just looking to find out what it was and see if any ideas for toys presented themselves but, kinda predictably, I ended up getting elbow-deep in a bucketful of audio routing graphs, gain nodes and impulse responses.

I'll write up a more detailed post about the API shortly but Max and I used it quite heavily in the 5apps hackathon we attended last week and I wanted to share the outcome of our hacking.

SoundScape

“A Nokia Map mashed together with a bunch of APIs and positional audio to create an immersive map experience.”

For a better explanation of how SoundScape works, check out Max's slides:

In essence, we use a Nokia Map as the base, add on a Flying Hamster, make a call to Freesound.org for geotagged audio samples, male a call to LastFM for upcoming concerts, make a call to Deezer for the most popular track by the artist playing the event reported by LastFM and put them all together in the browser using 3D positional audio. Basically.

The source is available on GitHub

The Actual Demo

SoundScape (Web Audio API-capable browser required)