Feross Aboukhadijeh, The Lost Art of MIDI – Bringing bgsound Back to the Web

Feross Aboukhadijeh demonstrates how to recreate the classic HTML bgsound tag and play MIDI files using WebAssembly, Emscripten, and Web Audio.

In the days of Geocities and Angelfire, a quirky HTML tag called bgsound enabled sound files to play in the background of webpages. Usually, these files were in the MIDI format. What a glorious era that was! Sadly, bgsound has been removed from browsers and MIDI is obscure and hard to play back. In this talk, we'll bring MIDI and bgsound back from the dead using WebAssembly, Emscripten, Web Audio, and Web Components. When we're finished, you'll be able to give your webpages the 90's treatment in a modern, standards-compliant way!