music21j

v0.16.7

Published

2 months ago

A toolkit for computer-aided musicology, Javascript version

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vanderstel

mscuthbert

jacobtylerwalls

music theory musicology notation

Music21j

Music21j: An Interactive Framework for Musical Analysis

Music21j is a Javascript reinterpretation of the Music21 Python package, a toolkit for computer-aided musicology, now with intuitive HTML/Javascript interfaces. Some things music21j offers are:

The ability to visualize and hear changes in Streams quickly (using Vexflow and MIDI.js)
Connections (via Web Midi or JazzSoft plugin) to MIDI devices.
Music theory and analysis modules at the level of music21 ca. 2014
A repository of modules such as metronomes, keyboards, and automatic transcribers.

Though it does not have all the power of Music21 Python, music21j can help with a number of research problems in music history and theory. The introduction to the Python package will say more about it (it's better documented). The "namespaces" tab above will give introductions to some features of music21j. At this point we're focusing on documenting usage; developer docs will come later.

Music21j requires your users to have a relatively recent web browser -- the project targets browsers no more than 30 months old. Safari is the only major desktop browser for which there is no out of the box support for MIDI devices.

Documentation

This README appears in both the GitHub home page and the documentation home page; currently building docs is broken

Begin at the {@link music21} namespace (click the link or use the menu above), or start with a specific one such as {@link music21.note} or {@link music21.stream} or a Class such as {@link music21.note.Note} or {@link music21.stream.Stream}.

(Ignore "Modules" they're not useful and duplicate the namespace pages).

Example

Install by downloading a copy of the music21 code to your own webserver.

% npm install music21j

If this line (npm install) doesn't work, download the latest version of node.js from https://nodejs.org/en/download/

A guide to installing music21j on Windows would be appreciated.

The files in music21j are best viewed by running your own webserver (rather than using file:///... links). We've included a small script to start you up:

$ cd ~/git/music21j
$ grunt webpack
$ python start_python_server.py

Then navigate to http://localhost:8000/testHTML/ for some demos.

To use music21j in your own page, place in a html page like this (this assumes that you're using the python server above).

<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>music21 test</title>
</head>
<body>
   <script src="/node_modules/music21j/releases/music21.debug.js">
   </script>
   <script>
   const n = new music21.note.Note('F#');
   const s = new music21.stream.Stream();
   s.append(n);
   s.appendNewDOM();
   </script>
</body>
</html>

or use it in your own Javascript/Typescript project:

$ npm install --save music21j

import * as music21 from 'music21j';

const n = new music21.note.Note('F#');
// etc.

Embedding, etc.

Music21j was originally intended for self-hosting, so embedding is not yet as simple as it should be.

To load soundfonts from other locations (like in a CDN), (1) set a global m21conf variable to disable loading soundfonts, (2) load the music21j script, and (3) set the new soundfont location, and (4) load the soundfont.

This fragment shows how to do it. A working implementation is in the testHTML directory as sfElsewhereCDN.html.

<body>
<script>
    window.m21conf = { loadSoundfont: false };
</script>
<script 
    src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/music21j/releases/music21.debug.min.js"
></script>
<script>
    music21.common.urls.soundfontUrl = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gleitz/midi-js-soundfonts/gh-pages/FluidR3_GM/';
    music21.miditools.loadSoundfont('clarinet', i => {
       const tn = music21.tinyNotation.TinyNotation('4/4 c4 d e f g1');
       tn.instrument = i;
       tn.playStream();
    });
</script>
</body>

Version

0.16 beta

License

Music21j is released under the BSD 3-Clause License. Essentially you can do with it what you want so long as you leave in my copyright statements and do not represent that I endorse your product.

Thanks

Thanks to the following packages (among others) for making music21j possible:

Vexflow - music notation in HTML5
midicube - audio processing of MIDI based on MIDI.js
Jazzsoft - plug-in for accessing MIDI in the browser in the absence of WebMIDI Api.
qUnit - testing framework
jsdoc - makes this documentation possible

The Python version of music21 was supported by grants from the Seaver Institute and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Earlier versions of music21 were supported by the Music and Theater Arts section of MIT (when Cuthbert was a professor there).

Dev Notes

Build and watch with

$ grunt

test with

$ grunt test

You might get an error that looks like this which you can currently ignore:

Access to XMLHttpRequest at 
'file:///soundfonts/midi-js-soundfonts-master/FluidR3_GM/acoustic_grand_piano-ogg.js' 
from origin 'null' has been blocked by CORS policy

We hope to fix it later, but for now, we're not testing audio output.

for running tests one time without watch, you can use:

$ grunt test_no_watch

Publishing a new version

You'll need to be part of the npm dev team.

Two steps

1: Build the latest version by running:

$ grunt

Then update the version number and commit with:

$ grunt publish

(It also tries to build the docs via grunt jsdoc (currently failing). The template is specified in jsdoc-template/jsdoc.conf.json)

For a non-backwards compatible release, edit the minor version number manually in this README.md, in main.ts, and in package.json. Then do all the steps again from the start. :-)

Then run the copy script with:

$ npm publish

which will copy the current contents of build in releases and publish on npm.

Before publishing, every once in a while run (in the music21j directory)

$ node_modules/.bin/npm-check-updates

and if it looks like something to update, run

$ node_modules/.bin/npm-check-updates -u
$ npm install

These docs may change someday in preparation for v.1.0 release.

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