USING WEBSOCKETS

Web browsers used to be like walkie-talkies, one person would speak and then wait for a reply. Over.

Modern web browsers allow many people to speak at the same time by taking advantage of a technology called WebSockets, that let you speak as if you were having a normal conversation.

In this Web Lab experiment, WebSockets have been used to allow you to play musical instruments together, over the internet, in a musical conversation.

But rather than sending and downloading each sound that gets played, which might take a long time depending on how fast your internet connection is, we've set up the WebSockets to have a conversation about what note is being played. Your browser then takes that string of information about the notes and makes them into sweet music.

To make this whole system even more efficient, a web server has been built using Node.js, which allows all of these conversations to take place between people all over the world, whenever they want, in near real-time.