Tala Keeper version 1.3.0 is the first public release of a visual metronome for practicing music involving complex (or simple) time structures.

The Web Audio API provides graph based API for audio generation and processing primitives with a focus on high performance and low latency. For custom processing that is not covered by the builtin native audio nodes, it provides a ScriptProcessorNode whose processing is determined by a Javascript function. Though the ScriptProcessorNode is presented like any other node type by the API, its behaviour differs from the other native nodes in some fundamental ways. This post examines some of these differences using a simple chime model as the use case, and derives some suggestions for the Web Audio API specification.

Here is a demo web app for exploring rāgās and their bhēdams.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Mr. Ramesh who showed me some amazing Excel wizardry and spells he’d cast to be able to take a raga and ask questions about its graha bhēdams. I hadn’t realized until then that the question of what the scales of ragas turn into when you do bhēdams on them (graha or śruti bhēdam) involves a rather non-trivial mental transformation, though one that is pretty simple to do on a computer. So I resurrected a rāgā database that I’d scraped off Wikipedia’s Janya Rāgās page some 4 years ago and made this bhēdam explorer web app.

The app could use some visual love, but it serves the exploratory purpose as it stands. Have fun with it!

Roman text with a few choice diacritics are a common need when writing about Indian classical music. Creating unicode text with diacritics that can be ported between applications is in general a pain. So, I made a small in-browser app that serves as a scratch pad for common diacritics.

Usage

Straight forward. You just type your text in the provided box using normal roman characters first - ex: “Sankarabharanam”. Once you’ve typed that in, you select each character to which you want to apply diacritical marks and click on the mark you want. You can also press the number key corresponding to the diacritical mark you want for the selected character. With this, you can get “Śankarābharaṇam”.

Your text is automatically saved to local storage, so you can visit the page any time and retrieve your text. You’ll never lose text you key in.

Known issues

This works fine in Chrome and Safari on MacOSX, but not in Firefox. I haven’t yet figured out why it doesn’t work in Firefox. If you find that it works in Chrome/Safari on Windows/Linux, please let me know in the comments.

Google has open sourced the Tuna set of effects used in their Jam with Chrome project. Here, I collect some thoughts about the code design decisions for their effects framework, since I myself have written Steller.