curioustorvald/microtone.js

Microtone.js is a web based version of a microtonal music tracker called Microtone, along with its audio engine named Taud, both originally built for a project called TSVM. A music tracker is a type of software where you compose music by entering notes and effects into a grid, similar to a spreadsheet, rather than playing them on a virtual keyboard. Microtonal means the tracker supports notes and tunings outside the standard twelve notes per octave used in most Western music, so it can work with alternate scales and pitch systems. The project is split into two main parts. The Taud engine is a JavaScript translation of the original Kotlin audio engine, and it runs inside something called an AudioWorklet, which is a browser feature for processing audio in a separate thread so it does not slow down the rest of the page. This engine is written as pure computation with no direct browser or Web Audio dependencies, meaning the same code can also run in Node.js outside a browser. That lets the developers test that its output matches the original engine exactly. The second part is the tracker interface itself, a rewrite of the original tracker screen using plain web technologies like canvas drawing and standard page elements, without any extra framework. You can try Microtone directly at microtone.cc with no installation needed. To run it on your own machine, no build process is required: you simply serve the project folder with any basic static file server and open it in a browser. Testing requires Node version 22 or higher, and the project includes a way to check the engine's audio output against reference recordings generated by the original Java based engine, using a shared set of test files. The code keeps the same function and variable names as the original Kotlin version, which makes it easier to keep both versions matching as the original project changes over time. Overall this is a small, focused open source project for musicians and developers interested in tunings beyond standard Western music.