[x3d-public] W3C announcement: Web Audio API brings audio design to the Web, becomes W3C Recommendation

[Don Brutzman]

========================================
https://www.w3.org/2021/06/pressrelease-webaudio.html.en

Web Audio API brings audio design to the Web as it becomes a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation

Web Audio API enables the creation and manipulation of music and sounds, directly in the browser.
Responsive, high-quality sounds in any website, any web app
Focussed on sound creation (rather than merely the playback of recorded audio), the Web Audio API provides a rich set of modular building blocks which web and app developers can combine to create a wide range of applications, including: auditory feedback in user interfaces, musical instruments, soundtracks and effects for entertainment and gaming, teaching, spatial audio for AR and VR, online audio editing apps, crossfading and compression for in-car music management, and audio analysis and visualisation.

Web Audio is available everywhere
With the API standardized and deployed as a royalty-free feature in Web browsers and other devices and platforms, both on desktop and mobile, creating sound with the Web Audio API has become a dependable, widely deployed, built-in capability, eliminating the need to install plugins or download separate applications.

Web Audio is used in many applications including: SoundCloud, Mozilla Hubs, Firefox Mixed Reality, Ableton, Google Meet and Stadia, SoundTrap, Amped Studio, BandLab, BeatPort, Soundation, Leimma & Apotome, and Spotify.

"The development of the Web Audio API to the point of it becoming a W3C Recommendation represents a huge effort from developers, audio experts and audio artists across industry and academia. A major contributing factor in the success of the API has been the support from the user community who have engaged with the spec and developed some incredible work", said Matthew Paradis, Audio WG co-chair. "The founding of the annual Web Audio conference has increased the reach of the API and provided a platform for academic, creative and scientific use of the WAAPI. Finally the enthusiasm of browser vendors to commit their time to shaping and implementing the API has made this a very rewarding process. I hope that this engagement will continue as we develop future enhancements to the API".

Web-wide, multi-user experiences
In contrast to most native audio applications, the Web Audio API naturally lends itself to creation of collaborative and interactive artworks online, where instead of a passive audience, people can actively interact with the artists and each other, using nothing more than the browser on their computer or mobile phone.

The future of Web Audio API is already in the works
The W3C Web Audio Working Group has benefitted from the shared developer experience of the global Web Audio community over the last six years, exemplified by the annual Web Audio Conference series and the Web Audio weekly newsletter.

Together, the Working Group and community have already started work on Web Audio API v2. This will build on and enrich the first version of the API, adding more complex and much-requested features which were insufficiently developed to be included in the first version of the API.

Web Audio API joins the many W3C standards that define an Open Web Platform for application development with unprecedented potential to enable developers to build rich interactive experiences, that are available on any device and environment.

Web3D Consortium Testimonial:

Extensible 3D (X3D) Graphics is the royalty-free open standard for publishing, viewing, printing and archiving interactive 3D models on the Web.

The W3C Web Audio API is unique and fundamentally important for adding high-fidelity audio processing in a performant cross-platform manner for the Web.

X3D version 4 fully integrates all capabilities in the W3C Web Audio API as a declarative audio graph, within X3D scene graphs, for processing and synthesizing audio in spatialized Web applications.

Open-source implementations and examples repeatably demonstrate how compelling audio capabilities improve 3D interaction, realism and presence on the Web.

Efi Lakka, University of South Wales, UK
Thanos Malamos, Hellenic Mediterranean University (HMU), Greece
Richard Puk, Intelligraphics Inc. USA
Don Brutzman, X3D Graphics Working Group, Web3D Consortium
========================================

Also tweeted at

* https://twitter.com/Web3DConsortium/status/1405554998633631745

all the best, Don
-- 
Don Brutzman  Naval Postgraduate School, Code USW/Br       brutzman at nps.edu
Watkins 270,  MOVES Institute, Monterey CA 93943-5000 USA   +1.831.656.2149
X3D graphics, virtual worlds, navy robotics http://faculty.nps.edu/brutzman