Presented at FITC Toronto 2017 More info at http://fitc.ca/event/to17/ Presented by Jean-Philippe Côté, TangibleJS Overview If you own an electronic music instrument made in the last 3 decades, it most likely supports the MIDI protocol. What if we told you that it is now possible to interact with your beloved keytar, drum machine or MIDI software directly from your browser? You would go crazy, right? Well, prepare to do so… With built-in support inside Chrome and Opera, upcoming support in Firefox and plugins for other platforms, this possibility is now a reality. This talk will introduce the audience to the Web MIDI API and to a library that will help you get the most out of it called WebMidi.js. Web devs, man your synths! Objective Kickstart the development of web-based, MIDI-driven projects. Target Audience Web developers who want to make some noise and musicians paying bills doing front-end dev gigs Assumed Audience Knowledge Basic knowledge of the world’s top 4 languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and MIDI Five Things Audience Members Will Learn What the Web MIDI API is and what it can be used for What the current support level for MIDI in browsers is Why the Web MIDI API is too low-level for the average web developer and what can be done about it How to send MIDI commands to MIDI devices and how to react to incoming MIDI events How it sounds when a web developer transforms into an electronic musician

1. Original art by Raul Taciu. Used with permission.

4. WEB MIDI API
« the Web-MIDI API
is the most significant advancement of MIDI since…
MIDI itself! »
— midi.org
Source: https://www.midi.org/articles/about-web-midi

5. Source: caniuse.com/#search=midi

6. jazz-soft.net

7. Firefox v52+
NPAPI
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jazz-midi/

9. Sources: caniuse.com/#search=midi and http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide
92%DESKTOP BROWSER COVERAGE

14. Web MIDI API Polyfill: http://cwilso.github.io/WebMIDIAPIShim/

18. Source: https://www.midi.org/specifications/item/table-2-expanded-messages-list-status-bytes

22. #%?*&$#!

23. https://github.com/cotejp/webmidi

24. Web MIDI Library: https://github.com/cotejp/webmidi

27. • decrementRegisteredParameter
• incrementRegisteredParameter
• playNote
• send
• sendActiveSensing
• sendChannelAftertouch
• sendChannelMode
• sendClock
• sendContinue
• sendControlChange
• sendKeyAftertouch
• sendPitchBend
• sendProgramChange
• sendReset
• sendSongPosition
• sendSongSelect
• sendStart
• sendStop
• sendSysex
• sendTimecodeQuarterFrame
• sendTuningRequest
• setMasterTuning
• setModulationRange
• setNonRegisteredParameter
• setPitchBendRange
• setRegisteredParameter
• setTuningBank
• setTuningProgram
• stopNote
Functions for outgoing MIDI messages

28. Events for incoming MIDI messages
• activesensing
• channelaftertouch
• channelmode
• clock
• continue
• controlchange
• keyaftertouch
• noteoff
• noteon
• pitchbend
• programchange
• reset
• songposition
• songselect
• start
• stop
• sysex
• timecode
• tuningrequest

29. What about latency?
Native Instruments Battery 4+ VS.

31. Pad Hit
440Hz Tone
LATENCY

32. 9ms16ms
Native Instruments Battery 4+
Numbers reflect the time between hitting a pad on AxiomPro controller and hearing the sound come out of the computer.
Tests performed on MacBook Pro (macOS Sierra). Buffer size was 128 samples.
VS.

33. What about latency?
Path A
Path B

34. How much slower?
0ms

35. https://github.com/cotejp/webmidi

36. THIS SLIDE
INTENTIONALLY
LEFT BLACK

38. 1988
Roland Octapad II (PAD-80)

43. CODE DEMO

49. LET’S HEAR IT OUT!

50. HOMEWORK

52. QUESTIONS ?

53. Vote for Web MIDI API Support in Microsoft Edge
https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-developer/suggestions/6508429-web-midi-api
Follow Web MIDI Development in Firefox
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836897
Web MIDI API Specification
https://webaudio.github.io/web-midi-api/
WebMidi Library
https://github.com/cotejp/webmidi
Web MIDI API Polyfill
http://cwilso.github.io/WebMIDIAPIShim/
Web MIDI API Shim for iOS
https://github.com/mizuhiki/WebMIDIAPIShimForiOS
Web MIDI Browser
http://www.taktech.org/takm/WebMIDIBrowser/
Tone.js Web Audio Framework
https://github.com/Tonejs/Tone.js/
Source Code From This Talk
https://github.com/cotejp/fitc-2017-midi-talk
Jazz-MIDI Extension for Firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jazz-midi/
Links from this talk