The Web Audio API is a W3C standard for lower level access to the audio system than the standard <audio>-tag, via a high level API.

Use cases includes games, art, audio synthesis, interactive applications, audio production and any application where fine-grained control of the audio data is required.

The API can accept input from a number of sources, including loading audio files and decoding them via the API or <audio>-elements. It also provides facilities to generate sound directly via the API through the use of oscillator nodes.

There is also a number of processing nodes, such as gains, delays and script processors (which eventually will be deprecated and replaced by more efficient nodes). These can in turn be used to build more complex effects and audio graphs.