Music paper

Why it exists

To have something to start from when the blank page will not speak. It is not a composer: it is a sheet of music paper that fills itself in, in a range you can sing, and that you can carry into the studio with one click.

The bars are not random across twelve semitones — that would be a siren. They sit in the scale you chose, move by steps with the occasional leap, and close on the tonic. Those are the three rules that separate a melody from a noise, and they are also the three you can write in twenty lines.

On scales and progressions

Six scales — major, natural minor, harmonic minor, both pentatonics and the blues — across twelve tonics, in four, eight, sixteen or thirty-two bars of four four.

The chord progression mode adds one thing, and it is worth saying in full: the chord symbol appears above each bar, and on strong beats the melody goes looking for a note of that chord. The progression is not played — the stave carries the melody and that is what you hear. The symbol is for whoever plays along.

When the chord and the scale disagree, the scale wins. A minor progression over a major scale asks for thirds that are not there: rather than reaching outside, the melody stays inside the scale you chose. That is a stated rule, not an accident — “inside the scale only” is the promise that makes checking the notes one by one unnecessary.

On the range and the accidentals

The range is an octave and a half anchored to the tonic, and the stave draws whatever ledger lines that takes: in C, C4 already sits one ledger line below the first line, and in v1 that C could not have been written at all.

There is no key signature. Every accidental is written in front of its own note, the way it goes on a sheet of notepaper: you read it without counting the sharps at the head of the stave, and you cannot get it wrong because there is nothing to remember from the start of the line.

Notes are written the way they are written, not the way the menu calls them. D♯ major does not exist on paper — it would need an F double sharp — so it is printed as E♭ major; C♯ major is printed as D♭, because five flats read faster than seven sharps. When that happens, the tool says so in a line under the stave. C♯ minor, on the other hand, stays C♯: it is not that flats always win, it is that the spelling with fewer signs does.

On the MIDI file

It is a format 0 Standard MIDI File: one track, 480 ticks per quarter, and the tempo you chose, written into the file. Every DAW opens it, and so does MuseScore. This page writes it byte by byte, with no libraries and without going through any server.

On the address

The parameters live in the address bar, generation seed included. Copying the link and sending it to someone means sending them these bars, not four others with the same settings. It is also why changing key does not make the melody jump: same seed, same shape, different pitch.

The melody you find when the page opens is the Ode to Joy — public domain for a century and a half — in the key you chose. It is also the sequence that follows your reading down the right margin of these pages, where it sits in D major as Beethoven wrote it.

On the audio

Sound only starts when you ask for it. Triangle waves with a soft attack and release, generated by the browser: no file is downloaded to let you hear a note.