composing.studio

This is the code for composing.studio, a web application that aims to make music composition collaborative and accessible to everyone.

composing.studio

Rationale

Right now it’s possible to write music in a textual format called ABC, which works for transcribing simple songs + guitar chords, as well as some other pieces like chorales and folk music. It has some limitations, but not too many (someone has encoded a Beethoven symphony in ABC before!).

Here’s an example of an interactive editor built with ABC: https://editor.drawthedots.com/. The editor is not super user-friendly, but it showcases the utility and interest in this space.

We provide a friendly and intuitive web-based interface for editing ABC music notation, with syntax highlighting, live preview, audio playback, and real-time collaboration. Anyone can create a new collaborative session by entering our website, and they can share the link with fellow composers to work together and come up with new ideas.

Getting Started

This application is built using a backend operational transformation control server written in Rust, based on Rustpad, as well as a frontend written in TypeScript using React.

The backend server has support for transient collaborative editing sessions, and the frontend offers a collaborative text editor with custom Monarch ABC syntax highlighting, cursors, and live presence tracking. These parts of the application are connected by WebSocket communication.

On the frontend, we use the abcjs library to dynamically render sheet music from ABC notation and generate interactive playback controls through web audio synthesis.

To run this application, you need to install Rust, wasm-pack, and Node.js. Then, build the WebAssembly portion of the app:

wasm-pack build --target web cstudio-wasm

When that is complete, you can install dependencies for the frontend React application:

npm install

Next, compile and run the backend web server:

cargo run

While the backend is running, open another shell and run the following command to start the frontend portion.

npm run dev

This command will open a browser window to http://localhost:3000, with hot reloading on changes.

Contributing

This project is still in a very experimental phase. We're exploring different ways of allowing musicians to collaborate with each other in a global community. If you're interested in adding features or helping fix bugs, please reach out to us first by creating a GitHub issue!

We have continuous integration for this repository, which checks things like code style (Prettier, Rustfmt) and successful build (Docker). The current state of the main branch is continuously deployed to the production web server at composing.studio.