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Music Blocks

“All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.” — Monk

“Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.” — Leibniz

Music Blocks is a Visual Programming Language and collection of manipulative tools for exploring musical and mathematical concepts in an integrative and fun way.

Getting Started

Music Blocks is an interactive Web Application — the interaction is done via basic mouse events like click, right click, click and drag, etc. and keyboard events like hotkey press. The application is audio-visual; it produces graphics artwork and music. Here are a couple of screenshots to give you an idea of how the application looks like:

alt tag

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Some background on why music and programming can be found here.

Refer to the following sections to get familiar with this application:

If you are a developer (beginner, experienced, or pro), you are very welcome to participate in the evolution of Music Blocks.

Refer to the following sections to get an idea:

Refer to the following for more information regarding the evolution of this project:

Running Music Blocks

Music Blocks is available under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3.0, a free, copyleft license.

Music Blocks is designed to run in a web browser. The ideal way to run Music Blocks is to visit the URL musicblocks.sugarlabs.org in your browser — Google Chrome (or Chromium), Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based), Mozilla Firefox, and Opera work best.

To run from the latest master branch (experimental), visit sugarlabs.github.io/musicblocks.

How to set up a local server

Music Blocks is written using native browser technologies. The bulk of the functionality is in vanilla JavaScript. This means that most of the functionality can be accessed by launching the index.html file in the browser using file:///absolute/path/to/index.html.

However, using so, some functionality will not be available. On top of that, some web browsers (e.g., Firefox v68) have restrictions that prevent Music Blocks from running using file:///. Therefore, it is best to launch a local web server from the directory of Music Blocks.

  1. Download Music Blocks, or clone (https://github.com/sugarlabs/musicblocks.git for HTTPS, or gh repo clone sugarlabs/musicblocks for GitHub CLI), on your local machine.

  2. In a terminal, cd to the directory where you downloaded/cloned Music Blocks, using cd path/to/musicblocks/.

  3. If you do not have Python installed, you'll need to install it. You can test for Python in a terminal using python. Type exit() to exit Python. (Note that on some older Linux systems, the python3 command is not bound to python. You may need to perform a sudo apt install python-is-python3 on Debian-like distros, or equivalent on others.)

  4. After cloning the musicblocks repository, run

    for Linux and macOS:

    python -c \"import os, sys; os.system('python -m SimpleHTTPServer 3000 --bind 127.0.0.1') if sys.version_info.major==2 else os.system('python -m http.server 3000 --bind 127.0.0.1');

    for Windows:

    py -c \"import os, sys; os.system('py -m SimpleHTTPServer 3000') if sys.version_info.major==2 else os.system('py -m http.server 3000 --bind 127.0.0.1');

    If you have npm installed, simply run npm run serve for Linux and macOS, and npm run winserve for Windows.

    NOTE: Make sure you can run either python or py from your terminal, to launch the Python prompt.

  5. You should see a message Serving HTTP on 127.0.0.1 port 3000 (http://127.0.0.1:3000/) ... since the HTTP Server is set to start listening on port 3000.

  6. Open your favorite browser and visit localhost:3000 or 127.0.0.1:3000.

NOTE: Use ctrl + c or cmd + c to quit the HTTP Server to avoid socket.error:[Errno 48].

Using Music Blocks

Once Music Blocks is running, you'll want suggestions on how to use it. Follow Using Music Blocks and Music Blocks Guide.

Looking for a block? Find it in the Palette Tables.

Contributing

Please consider contributing to the project, with your ideas, your music, your lesson plans, your artwork, and your code.

Special Notes

Music Blocks is being built from the ground-up, to address several architectural problems with this run. Since Music Blocks is a fork of Turtle Blocks JS, musical functionality was added on top of it. However, music is fundamental to Music Blocks. Besides, the Turtle Blocks JS started initially with handful of features, and was written without a complex architecture. As Music Blocks got built on top of that, it got incrementally complex, but the architecture remained simple, thus resulting in a monolith. Also, the functionality is tightly coupled with the interface and native client API (Web API).

Keeping these problems in mind, we have considered a foundational rebuild that will address all these issues, whilst adding buffers for future additions. We'll also be using a more elegant tech-stack to develop and maintain this project given its scale. After the core is built, we'll be porting features from this application to it.

Refer to the repository sugarlabs/musicblocks-2 for more information about the new project — Music Blocks 2.0.

Tech Stack

Music Blocks is a Web Application and is written using browser technologies — HTML, CSS (SCSS), JavaScript, SVG, etc.

If you're just getting started with development, you may refer to the following resources:

Programmers, please follow these general guidelines for contributions.

New Contributors

Use the discussions tab at the top of the repository to:

  • Ask questions you’re wondering about.
  • Share ideas.
  • Engage with other community members.

Feel free. But, please don't spam :p.

Keep in Mind

  1. Your contributions need not necessarily have to address any discovered issue. If you encounter any, feel free to add a fix through a PR, or create a new issue ticket.

  2. Use labels on your issues and PRs.

  3. Do not spam with lots of PRs with little changes.

  4. If you are addressing a bulk change, divide your commits across multiple PRs, and send them one at a time. The fewer the number of files addressed per PR, the better.

  5. Communicate effectively. Go straight to the point. You don't need to address anyone using 'sir'. Don't write unnecessary comments; don't be over-apologetic. There is no superiority hierarchy. Every single contribution is welcome, as long as it doesn't spam or distract the flow.

  6. Write useful, brief commit messages. Add commit descriptions if necessary. PR name should speak about what it is addressing and not the issue. In case a PR fixes an issue, use fixes #ticketno or closes #ticketno in the PR's comment. Briefly explain what your PR is doing.

  7. Always test your changes extensively before creating a PR. There's no sense in merging broken code. If a PR is a work in progress (WIP), convert it to draft. It'll let the maintainers know it isn't ready for merging.

  8. Read and revise the concepts about programming constructs you're dealing with. You must be clear about the behavior of the language or compiler/transpiler. See JavaScript docs.

  9. If you have a question, do a web search first. If you don't find any satisfactory answer, then ask it in a comment. If it is a general question about Music Blocks, please use the new discussions tab on top the the repository, or the Sugar-dev Devel <[email protected]> mailing list. Don't ask silly questions (unless you don't know it is silly ;p) before searching it on the web.

  10. Work on things that matter. Follow three milestones: Port Ready, Migration, and Future. Those tagged Port Ready are priority. Those tagged with Migration will be taken care of during or after the foundation rebuild. Feel free to participate in the conversation, adding valuable comments. Those tagged with Future need not be addressed presently.

Please note there is no need to ask permission to work on an issue. You should check for pull requests linked to an issue you are addressing; if there are none, then assume nobody has done anything. Begin to fix the problem, test, make your commits, push your commits, then make a pull request. Mention an issue number in the pull request, but not the commit message. These practices allow the competition of ideas (Sugar Labs is a meritocracy).

Modifying Music Blocks

The core functionality for Music Blocks resides in the js/ directory. Individual modules are described in more detail in js/README.md.

NOTE: As for any changes, please make your own copy by cloning this repository. Make your changes, test them, and then make a pull request.

See Contributing Code to get a general idea about this organizations guidelines. See Contributing section for specific details about this repository.

Reporting Bugs

Bugs can be reported in the issues tab of this repository.

If possible, please include the browser console log output, and steps to reproduce, when reporting bugs. To access the console, type Ctrl-Shift-J/F12 on most browsers. Alternately, right click and select Inspect. You may need to set the Default levels for the console to Verbose in order to see all of the output, however, in most cases that won't be required. In fact, it'll only clutter the list, so select it only when required.

Credits

Music Blocks is a fork of Turtle Blocks JS created by Walter Bender (@walterbender).

Devin Ulibarri has contributed functional and user-interface designs. Many of his contributions were inspired by the music education ideas, representations and practices (e.g. aspects of matrix, musical cups) developed and published by Larry Scripp with whom Devin studied at New England Conservatory and for whom he worked at Affron Scripp & Associates, LLC, Center for Music and the Arts in Education (CMAIE), and Music in Education. Some of the initial graphics were contributed by Chie Yasuda.

Much of the initial coding specific to Music Blocks was done by Yash Khandelwal (@khandelwalYash) as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2015. Hemant Kasat (@hemantkasat) contributed to additional widgets as part of GSoC 2016. Additional contributions were made by Tayba Wasim (@Tabs16), Dinuka Tharangi Jayaweera (@Tharangi), Prachi Agrawal (@prachiagrawal269), Cristina Del Puerto (@cristinadp), and Hrishi Patel (@Hrishi1999) as part of GSoC 2017. During GSoC 2018, Riya Lohia (@riyalohia) developed a Temperament widget. Ritwik Abhishek (@a-ritwik) added a keyboard widget and a pitch-tracking widget. During GSoC 2019, Favor Kelvin (@fakela) refactored much of the code to use promises. During GSoC 2020, Anindya Kundu (@meganindya) did a major refactoring of the code base to support JavaScript export. Aviral Gangwar (@aviral243) enhanced the internal representation of mode and key. Saksham Mrig (@sksum) fixed 70+ bugs and added support for pitch tracking and MIDI import.

Many students contributed to the project as part of Google Code-in (2015–2019). Sam Parkinson (@samdroid-apps) built the Planet during GCI. Emily Ong (@EmilyOng) designed our mouse icon and Euan Ong (@eohomegrownapps) redesigned the Planet code as a series of GCI tasks. Austin George (@aust-n) refactored the toolbars as a series of GCI tasks. Bottersnike (@Bottersnike) redesigned the widgets and the Block API, Andrea Gonzales (@AndreaGon) made the widgets responsive, Marcus Chong (@pidddgy) refactored the update code, resulting in an order-of-magnitude improvement in CPU usage, and Samyok Nepal (@nepaltechguy2) updated the local storage mechanism to use localForage.

A full list of contributors is available.

Music Blocks in Japan

Gakken STEAM