In the beginning
On the web, audio is useful for gaming, musical applications, audio processing and app UX feedback. That is why developers soon needed tools. First, developers had Bgsound, an Internet Explorer element that linked a background sound with a page, using frames. Later, they had the possibility of using Flash or Java to replay songs on a website with table layout. Then came the real audio technology (with elements like <audio> and float layout) which permitted the streaming and analysis of audio. It was more complicated to create the filters and tools for music creation, that one may find in audio date APIs. Finally developers came up with the web audio API.
Specialists explain that the web audio API gives low-level access to all things audio and lets the user create and manipulate sounds, using filters. It provides precise timing of lots of overlapping sounds and an audio pipeline and routing system for effects and filters. It offers tools like spatial audio and audio analysis tools. The web audio API offers a collaborative music production environment using emerging web standards, a music production software that runs in a browser. It processes audio for the developer. The web audio field is linked to the web MIDI API, which is not the General MIDI format for reading sheet music. Web MIDI helps to control audio. It is a protocol for digital instruments that sends data to an application.
Let us notice that the web audio domain may be used to create live audio performance or to build digital instruments. How? Actually the web audio API contains building blocks that may be used to construct all sound modifications that the developer wants.
What do developers need exactly to build a musical and audio application? Elements like: filtering, compression, audio input, delays and delay effects, waveform synthesis (oscillators), envelopes and offline processing. Specialists explain that most musical effects are more complex than just a single filter or delay. Delay may be changed by a high frequency isolator.
What do users want from a music streaming service? Recommendation is not only about smarter algorithms or smoother curation of playlists. It is about understanding when users are receptive to actively looking for new music, when they want to be left alone in order to make personal searches, etc.
Listeners' experience
In today's music listening experience, marketeers distinguish 'lean back' experience and 'lean forward experience'. In the first case, a music service is guiding the audio experience. In the second case, the listener controls the music experience (through playlists creation). As lean forward is a proactive experiment, listener's engagement is higher. In a sense, music listeners are forced to limit their music listening experience because the number of music songs published online is too big to be explored. It may be hard for a music streaming service to target the right audience.
However, music listeners who are making a lean forward experience are active fans (in music niches) or core enthusiasts (in the mainstream). Listeners making a lean back experience are indie followers (in niche music) and lean back listeners (in the mainstream). Studies show that lean forward listeners are generally young and early tech adopters and that lean back listeners are generally older and later tech adopters. Also, lean forward listeners are generally more social and lean back listeners are generally more reflexive. Yet these are just general trends.
For listeners, different elements may separate a good musical performance from a not-so-good one. Music which moves them, which is perceived as sincere, emotional, inspiring, expressive or aesthetically beautiful is more sought after. Sometimes the most appreciated element is the pitch (intonation) of the music, sometimes the rhythm, the dynamics or the timbre. All these elements are originally chosen by the composer of a piece of music, but the performer brings some creativity to a piece and the listener too. The composer is expressing an intention and the listener is perceiving an intention. Their mental representations may be different. However music performance is a meeting. Music performance makes changes in the physical world. And listeners, hearing the music, make changes in their mental worlds.