Building an intuitive web-based musical instrument
summary
Pastelloops is a web instrument that maps the canvas Y coordinate to pitches from a chosen scale and maps brush texture to timbre, letting users draw melodies in real time. Built with React and the Web Audio stack, it uses Google Magenta–style models to generate and interpolate a dozen acoustic timbres so brush thickness smoothly changes sound. Playback currently scans left-to-right (XY readout) rather than time-ordered replay. Prototype is open source and was tested informally by visual artists and a five‑year‑old.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:10Project background and inspiration
- 3:20User interface and features
- 7:05Sound mapping and customization
- 9:54Future possibilities and improvements
- 12:04User feedback and next steps
- 13:36Q&A session
related talks
20mLook What You MIDI Me Do!
33mCode, Play & Rock 'n' Roll: A WebAudio Experiment
14mMusical Creativity in the Browser
31mI Play the JavaScript
40mLiveJS: Making Music with JavaScript
30mBuilding a musical instrument with the Web Audio API
24mPlay Them Off, Keyboard App: Building a virtual piano in JavaScript
44mBeats in the Browser - Coding Music with JavaScript