Sound of Summer
This is sooo nifty: Chloe’s obsessive Summer music visualisation is a lesson in responsive design and progressive enhancement. It’s also pretty fascinating.
Poco Apollo
Here’s a beautiful use of the web audio API: Enoesque generative music composed right in your browser. Each piece is generated from one of the 14,226 photos in NASA’s Apollo archive. The darker and murkier the picture, the moodier the music.
Related links
Dewey Music
A treasure trove of music from Archive.org.
Project Apollo Archive on Flickr
This is so, so wonderful—hundreds and hundreds of photographs from all of the Apollo missions. Gorgeous!
The shots of Earth take my breath away.
JavaScript Systems Music
A massively in-depth study of boundary-breaking music, recreated through the web audio API.
- Steve Reich - It’s Gonna Rain (1965)
- Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports, 2/1 (1978)
- 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.