Javascript Musical Notation

For my five-part series on a mysterious musical code in the Rosslyn Chapel that ran in Slate in May of 2011, I wrote a an interactive version of the cipher’s melodies using Raphael and Sound Manager 2. Like a musical notation program such as Finale, this widget allows readers can listen to a melody and see each note turn red as it’s played. Sound Manager 2 is a convenient Javascript library that attempts to implement audio in HTML5 and falls back to Flash for non-supported browsers.

This library is far from complete, but the end goal is to render the notation dynamically from a text file of notes. The sounds themselves were produced with MuseScore,¹ an excellent, free notation program that will export melodies as .mp3 files.