I have been building a browser board game (Samudra Manthana, an asymmetric strategy game), and when it came time to add sound, the usual route was to go shopping: find effects, check each licence, download a pile of .wav files, and watch the bundle get heavier.
I did not do that. Every sound effect in the game is synthesised at runtime with the Web Audio API. No files, no licences, almost no bytes. Here is the whole approach.
Two primitives
It turns out you can build a surprisingly expressive palette from just two functions.
A tone: one note with a soft attack and an exponential decay.
