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info Create elaborate soundscapes with Hz.
Forget point-and-click. Hz is a code-powered IDE for crafting intricate soundscapes and composing electronic music with watchmaker precision. Tailored for the technological artist, Hz empowers you to sculpt audio with deliberate intent.
Hz comes in two flavors.
Hz is the original downloadable edition with its custom audio engine built for high-performance audio creation atop
CLAPplugins.HzWeb offers the same programmable development environment but is built atop your browser's WebAudio engine and the
Web Audio Module (WAM)plugin standard.
Both flavors require a desktop or laptop computer with keyboard,
audio IO and optional MIDI input devices. Hz requires a modern install
of MacOS or Window, but HzWeb runs whereever your modern browser does.
Extensible Sound System
Hz is a musical laboratory that provides convenient access
to a broad range of musical and audio authoring tools from the
comfort
of your favorite web browser.
Hz allows you to extend and tailor your audio workbench to fit your
general and project-specific needs.
info
Hzis programmable at every level of its architecture, but you can also just plug in your favorite MIDI or audio devices and just jam.
Hz Component Overview
At the top of the stack, Songs.hz enables musical programming: the description of note and chord sequences, their voicing and articulation using a concise, text-editor-friendly musical notation system.
Next in the stack is JavaScript. This high-level, general-purpose
programming environments is powered-up by Hz's Music API
to control all aspects of the audio-engine and its plugin synth
and effects nodes. WebAudio developers can think of the MusicAPI
as a portable API to facilitate interoperation between web and desktop
versions of Hz. We provide a plethora of examples including
scripts that allow you to simply shutup 'n play yer instrument.
Under the Covers
The Audio Engine processes sound by evaluating an Audio Graph. Your scripts can instantiate, connect and rewire audio graph nodes on the fly to produce an ever-changing, sound-producing computation. Each node in the graph represents a portion of your soundscape, either a synthesizer or an effect processor. Typical graphs comprise hundreds of nodes and their connections determine the processing order and signal routing.
HzWeb audio-graph nodes take the form of Web Audio Modules
the web-audio plugin architecture. You can procure WAM Plugins from a number of
sources or write your own. Hz comes with a foundational set of audio nodes
so it just works out-of-the box.
Hz audio-graph nodes take the form of CLAP Plugins,
the next-generation audio plugin architecture. You can procure
CLAP Plugins from a number of sources or write your own. Hz comes
with a foundational set of audio nodes
so it just works out-of-the box.
We heartily support the use of third-party plugins and include examples and resource-links here.