musje

Musje 2.0

A numbered musical notation in sheet music.

Background

Musje is sparrow in Dutch. The first numbered musical notation was presented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the French Academy of Sciences in 1742. It has been evolved and become popular in some areas of Asia. It is called jianpu, literally simple music score, in Chinese. The musje 123 is a music processor based on this notation.

Getting started

# todos
- apply gh-pages supports in musje for the follows:
- add Demo page;
- add Devel page.

1. Checkout the Demo.
2. Or put the https://github.com/malcomwu/musje/blob/master/demo.html and https://github.com/malcomwu/musje/blob/master/musje.js in the same folder; double-click the demo.html.

Install

For the npm module system:

npm install musje --save

Usage

<script src="path/to/musje.js"></script>
<script>
  var score = musje.parse(MusjeSrc)
  // The rest are same as below.
</script> 

Or in ES6 module:

import { parse } from 'musje'
const score = parse(MusjeSrc)
score.addStyle(sty1, sty2)
     .addStyle(sty3)
document.body.appendChild(score.render())
score.play()
score.stop()

Notion of jianpu

In comparison of the western sheet music, jianpu is closely related. The design of musje is made for the greatest interception for this. The major difference is that the western one is graphical in pitch (vertical positioning) while the jianpu is symbolic. This is perhaps why many Chineses may like it because the ancient pitch scales were written in symbols, the five 宮 商 角 徵 羽 pure intonation, and the twelve-tone 黃鐘 姑洗 .. equal temparament, and later on the 宮尺. One may think of to convert the 1, 2, .. 7 to C, D, .. B, or else for your interest. Due to the symbolic pitching, no clef is necessory.

It is the same that there is not a natural place to draw the key signature. The rest are the same, so that we may see a lot of accidentals in most measures. This is taken as a good consquence because it is aim for the beginners. However, one can less easily recognize the key of this music. Therefore, some place an A, Dm, .. symbol or so to be shown as a key signature, but it does not alter anything. However, it is sometimes confused with the idea of transpose. This is normal for a transpose instrument and important for the solfège. The idea is that C 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 and G 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 is a transpose, in which the latter is the same as C 5 6 7 1' 2' 3' #4'. Some places a G transpose to be a direction above the 1, i.e., /G 1 2.. The G means a transpose or fifth: +1 in key signature? In general, the users of jianpu take this as a key signature, while the current iteration of musje still consider this as a transposition. It will be considered in the later version of musje.

For the first class of a jianpu lesson, it starts with:

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  1'
do re mi fa sol la si do

This is probably the most intuitive of jianpu over the western sheet music. To advance it in playing instruments, we learn:

1  #1  2  #2  3  4 #4  5  #5  6 #6  7 n1'
do di re  ri mi fa fi sol si la li ti do

to sing. Why a jianpu user take the G in /G 1 2 as a key rather than a transpose can be imagined. The 1..7 is naturally as solfège, but musje takes them as notes, i.e., steps, C..B, for the startup. It is referred to as 首調 (solfège) and 固定調 (note name) in Chinese.

For the rest, it is still considered to be very closely the same for musje between jianpu and the western sheet music.

It may be thought that the western sheet music is like to play a Snooker, with so large table and tiny hole, and scattered by a lot of small balls. It is so difficul to master so that some play Pool such as the jianpu. But they are both billiards (sheet music). In general, the western sheet music has a steeper learning curve in the beginning, but easier to become professinal in the academic level. The jianpu has a shellow learning curve but generally it stops in the user's profession.

Language description

• The grammar of musje 2.0 (https://github.com/malcomwu/musje/blob/master/grammar.md).
• The musje stylesheet (https://github.com/malcomwu/musje/blob/master/stylesheet.md).

Development

This project was initiated about year 2015; however, several attempts has been missed or discontinued. This version is musje 2 (codename: gezondheid). Please first checkout Devel to get a glance.

For developers,

npm run serve

and http://localhost:9000/.

Technical notes

• Th language is derived from LilyPond, abc, pmx and the MusicTeX family.
• The data structure is adapted from the MusicXML 3.0.
• The idea of parsing is based on "Let's Build a Compiler - Jack Crenshaw".
• The flow of layout starts from the ideas of the css box model and stylesheets.
• The rendering uses an el.js by-product, affected by "Eloquent JavaScript - Marijn Haverbeke". However, it can be easily reproduced by some other libraries or using canvas.
• It uses the musical font of Cadence, LilyPond, and takes some from MuseScore.

Potential interest of applications

1. Build a music library or wiki.
2. Use in a professional music system to discuss the musical ideas, such as StackOverflow.
3. Use in a social media, such as Facebook, to share the musical snippets to friends.