Plainsong Playground

Write it anywhere

Plainsong is a faithful subset of music notation in plain text. If you read music but not code, you already understand most of that block — it's a lead sheet with the bars drawn in. If you write code but not music, the thing to know is that you never declare durations: write how many events happen in a bar and the bar divides itself.

Hear it immediately

The Playground is a working compiler in one HTML file — parser, arranger, MIDI writer, and a player. It's checked against the reference Python compiler by running both over the same notation and comparing the pitch, start, and length of every note: triplets, 3/4, 6/8, chord qualities, stacks, sustains, rests, and repeated rows.

Believe the simulations

Two of the system's ideas are hard to believe from prose, so the Playground lets you touch them:

• The subdividing bar — change how many events a bar holds and watch the bar divide itself, live.
• The 0 ms stage — four players and a listener on a stage you can drag. Move the ear onto the podium and the four sounds land 0 ms apart. Move it anywhere else and they don't.

No server, no build step, no network. Nothing you type leaves the page — you can even save it and open it from file://.