With the appearance of HTML5 and the Web Audio API, a high-level JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio, new interesting Web applications can now be developed. The Web Audio API offers a set of native and fast C++ audio nodes, and a generic ScriptProcessor node, allowing the developer to add his own specialized node in the form of pure JavaScript code. Several projects are developing abstractions on top of the Web Audio API to extend its capabilities, and offer more complex unit generators, DSP effects libraries, or adapted syntax.
This paper brings another approach based on the use of the Faust audio DSP language to develop additional nodes to be used as basic audio DSP blocks in the Web Audio graph. Several methods have been explored: going from an experimental version that embeds the complete Faust native compilation chain (based on libfaust + LLVM) in the browser, to more portable solutions using JavaScript or the much more efficient asm.js version. Embedding the Faust compiler itself as a pure JavaScript library (produced using Emscripten) will also be described. The advantages and issues of each approach will be discussed and some benchmarks will be given.