Web Based Works

These are a collection of works made for the web. Note: to comply with autoplay rules that exist across most browsers some of the pages which would have auto-played in the past now pause and have you click a ‘start audio’ button to allow them to start up.

Some general thoughts on web-based works:

Making open ended works immediately raises the question of how they are going to be heard. Crafting installations, where the audience can come and go as they please, taking in as much or as little of a sound work as they like and experiencing a unique combination of sonic events is a very satisfying way to show such generative or open ended work but it is demanding on gallery time and space which is often at a premium.

Around 2015 – searching for ways of presenting the work I was producing as part of my research - I started to explore the web as a means of deploying generative sound works. The web has the advantages of an installation, with generative pieces able to play out over potentially infinite or at least long running times. They can be put on in the background whilst you work or potter about. Of course, looking back now, webpages are completely out-moded by apps (and Brian Eno himself has explored this territory very successfully). The works here are presented as something of an archive, rather than a going concern.

I made a (now defunct) flash application that played loops very much in the Brian Eno ‘Music for Airports’ mould. At the time audio on the web was fairly primitive (see landscape which used just HTML5 audio tags) but the Web Audio API has developed considerably since. It wasn’t sophisticated enough – and I not skilled enough a coder - to reproduce the works in my portfolio that relied on Pure Data to process the sound and python to wrangle data (see my thesis for more detail) but in researching my options I got a few ideas. Playing soundfiles at random intervals and orders produced Landscape and Song Derived from a Song. More sophisticated processing (with a little help) and a rabbit hole involving calculating the time of sunset produced Nochevkoy. Messing around with twitter data and birdsong (which never produced a portfolio piece) I hit on the idea of Syrinx – which is now silent thanks to changes on that site. This is turn produced The Lark is my Morning Alamer. Enosstudio is something of a curiosity.

Sheffield, October 2025