AudioListener

Baseline Widely available *

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since April 2021.

* Some parts of this feature may have varying levels of support.

The AudioListener interface represents the position and orientation of the unique person listening to the audio scene, and is used in audio spatialization. All PannerNodes spatialize in relation to the AudioListener stored in the BaseAudioContext.listener attribute.

It is important to note that there is only one listener per context and that it isn't an AudioNode.

We see the position, up and front vectors of an AudioListener, with the up and front vectors at 90° from the other.

Instance properties

Note: The position, forward, and up value are set and retrieved using different syntaxes. Retrieval is done by accessing, for example, AudioListener.positionX, while setting the same property is done with AudioListener.positionX.value. This is why these values are not marked read only, which is how they appear in the specification's IDL.

AudioListener.positionX

Represents the horizontal position of the listener in a right-hand cartesian coordinate system. The default is 0.

AudioListener.positionY

Represents the vertical position of the listener in a right-hand cartesian coordinate system. The default is 0.

AudioListener.positionZ

Represents the longitudinal (back and forth) position of the listener in a right-hand cartesian coordinate system. The default is 0.

AudioListener.forwardX

Represents the horizontal position of the listener's forward direction in the same cartesian coordinate system as the position (positionX, positionY, and positionZ) values. The forward and up values are linearly independent of each other. The default is 0.

AudioListener.forwardY

Represents the vertical position of the listener's forward direction in the same cartesian coordinate system as the position (positionX, positionY, and positionZ) values. The forward and up values are linearly independent of each other. The default is 0.

AudioListener.forwardZ

Represents the longitudinal (back and forth) position of the listener's forward direction in the same cartesian coordinate system as the position (positionX, positionY, and positionZ) values. The forward and up values are linearly independent of each other. The default is -1.

AudioListener.upX

Represents the horizontal position of the top of the listener's head in the same cartesian coordinate system as the position (positionX, positionY, and positionZ) values. The forward and up values are linearly independent of each other. The default is 0.

AudioListener.upY

Represents the vertical position of the top of the listener's head in the same cartesian coordinate system as the position (positionX, positionY, and positionZ) values. The forward and up values are linearly independent of each other. The default is 1.

AudioListener.upZ

Represents the longitudinal (back and forth) position of the top of the listener's head in the same cartesian coordinate system as the position (positionX, positionY, and positionZ) values. The forward and up values are linearly independent of each other. The default is 0.

Instance methods

AudioListener.setOrientation()

Sets the orientation of the listener.

AudioListener.setPosition()

Sets the position of the listener.

Note: Although these methods are deprecated they are currently the only way to set the orientation and position in Firefox (see Firefox bug 1283029).

Deprecated features

The setOrientation() and setPosition() methods have been replaced by setting their property value equivalents. For example setPosition(x, y, z) can be achieved by setting positionX.value, positionY.value, and positionZ.value respectively.

Example

See BaseAudioContext.createPanner() for example code.

Specifications

Specification
Web Audio API
# AudioListener

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also