Most React applications treat state as the single source of truth. But what happens when time itself lives outside React?
While building a production multi-track timeline engine, we discovered that the Web Audio transport, not React state had to become the canonical timeline. In this talk, we will explore how we designed a channel-based audio graph and canvas-rendered editor around an external high-precision clock, enabling deterministic synchronization of externally generated audio and media, 60fps rendering, and zero-reload state updates without letting React’s reconciliation interfere with real-time guarantees.
This talk has been presented at React Summit 2026, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.


















