Organising the Web Audio Conference 2021

21 May, 2022

The Web Audio Conference is an international conference that congregates the communitty interested in pushing further the web audio technologies and their applications. It gathers academic research, artistic research, development, design, evaluation and standards concerned with emerging audio-related web technologies such as Web Audio API, Web RTC, WebSockets and Javascript.

It’s been celebrated 8 times since 2015 when it was born in Paris. In 2019 I had the honor of being selected to organise the 6th edition in the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Unfortunately, in 2020 the Corona Virus Pandemic hit and we had to adapt the conference, to make it for the first time online (web).

Luckily, we had the sponsorship of Gather Town where we created a virtual conference room where we held the conference. Poster sessions where great as we could walk around the Poster room to see every work exposed in each session.

We had the pleasure of having three great key note speakers.

Anna Xambó specialised in human-computer interaction and music technology at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and completed her PhD in music computing at The Open University. She gave a great talk her experiences and on network music performance.

Juanjo Montiel is a senior software engineer and Microsoft Accessibility MVP. He gave us a master class on web accessibility and the great potential the web audio technolgies have to improve accessibility on the browser.

Anna Huang is a Research Scientist at Google Brain, working on the Magenta project. Her research focuses on designing generative models and tools to make music more interactive and approachable. She holds a PhD in computer science from Harvard University and was a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

The event was a great success, and everyone in the community had a great time, thanks to our sponsors Gather Town, Source Elements and Dolby.io This event was also include as part of the International Year of Sound 2020-2021