Clarence Barlow, “a genial, gregarious soul with a delightful sense of humour”, and my perhaps most important composition teacher, passed on recently. That’s gotten me listening through recordings of his music, revisiting some of his lectures and interviews, and thinking through some of what I learnt from him.
I recently began using Wavesurfer.js on my site rather than embedding everything via SoundCloud. The numerous options that Wavesurfer provides got me looking at the way waveforms are displayed on the web in a little more detail, and got me thinking about recent trends in visualizing audio.
Over the past two years I’ve been leaning towards simply using a native HTML5 audio player rather than embedding everything via SoundCloud on my site. It feels easier, lighter. It’s quicker to load and there aren’t any cookie notices to tug at you.