Examples of working with Web Audio from the BBC

The R & D team of the BBC published a project in which, using Web Audio, recreated a couple of devices used on the BBC around the 1960s.


The first one, Gunfire Effects, is a firearm simulator, the electronic version of which was developed in 1954 for use in radio productions.
It consists of a white noise generator, a “gate” (in fact, they will be enhanced with an envelope ) driven by a pulse generator, and an LP filter that creates “remoteness” by cutting off high frequencies.
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The second example, Wobbulator is, in fact, the most primitive analog synthesizer with three waveforms of a sound oscillator: a sine wave, a square and a saw.
As far as I understand, the BBC was used to sound all sorts of "space" pieces.
It consists of two oscillators: the first (LFO) with its sinusoid controls the frequency of the second (sound).

Third, Tape Loops - reflections on the topic of "analog samplers."
At a time when digital technology did not exist yet and the entire recording was built around multi-track tape recorders, people enjoyed themselves with this tape as much as they could .
For example, they cut off a small piece of film, glued it into a ring, recorded some sound on this ring and let it spin endlessly. At the same time, they could change the playback speed, the direction of film movement, or even create a sort of delay in a very tricky way: a “copy” of the sound signal was sent in real time to a film recorder, which recorded this signal on the film and immediately reproduced it with a nearby reproduction head - in this case, the delay time depends on the speed of passage of the film between the heads.

And the fourth example, Ring Modulator - was used by the BBC to create voices of monsters and robots.
The essence of his work was to multiply the two signals on each other. The voice was the first signal, the second, for example, a sine wave with a frequency of about 30 Hz.
By the way, today, RM is found in almost all synthesizers, effectors and samplers.

You can play around with this and see the coffee-script code with comments here:
webaudio.prototyping.bbc.co.uk