Ever Wanted to Turn Your Browser Into a Musical Instrument? Now You Can!

Most of us use our internet browsers to cycle through the same three activities day in day day out: we send emails, we like tweets, and we despair at there never being anything good on Facebook anymore. It doesn't have to be like that though. There's so much we can do, so many hitherto unexplored avenues of potential which we could wander down if we could just be arsed to tear away from hate-reading someone's timeline.

Google seem to know this better than anyone. The search engine behemoth have just launched the Chrome Music Lab, a 'Web Audio API' which allows you to explore a variety of of electronic experiments. If you're not sure what a 'Web Audio API' is, and we didn't know ourselves till today, it's something that "involves handling audio operations inside an audio context, and has been designed to allow modular routing," which means, "basic audio operations are performed with audio nodes, which are linked together to form an audio routing graph. Several sources — with different types of channel layout — are supported even within a single context" Which in turn means it's essentially a platform that allows you to have fun with a variety of in-browser activities. In Chrome's case, they're all very cute and look like this:

And this:

And this:

So far, so Muji window display. The developers had this to say about the Chrome Music Lab:

"Music is for everyone. So this year for Music In Our Schools month, we wanted to make learning music a bit more accessible to everyone by using technology that's open to everyone: the web. Chrome Music Lab is a collection of experiments that let anyone, at any age, explore how music works. They're collaborations between musicians and coders, all built with the freely available Web Audio API. These experiments are just a start. Check out each experiment to find open-source code you can use to build your own."

What can you actually do with it though? Well, that's sort of up to you. Thus far there are 12 experiments to, well, experiment with. These range from arpeggiators to spectrograms to oscillators, and they all make nice, fun, clean noises, so we can all spend our afternoons pretending we're working on a Serious Musical Project when we're really just making nice little cartoon robots jump around. Which is infinitely more fun than not clicking on another boring link a boring sort-of-friend has posted on Facebook.

We're expecting more and more experiments to arrive as the days go by. Finally, something to live online for!

Keep your eyes peeled on the Chrome Music Lab for more information.