24-tone HTML5 Makam Piano for Turkish Art music

Abstract

Latest HTML5 with JavaScript developments have stimulated a profusion of musical web-applications to emerge on the scene in the past couple of years. Firefox and Chrome browser support for them too has currently reached a comparatively stable level. Yet, these are mainly fashioned to appeal to a Western(ized) audience accustomed to the "12 semitones to the octave" methodology of common-practice music. We, on the other hand, present herein a microtonal HTML5 Piano design for Turkish Art music drawing from the extensively revamped open source code named "JS Dynamic Audio Synth (© 2013)". Two tunings are directly implemented at the moment: The first is the conventional 24-toneArel-Ezgi-Uzdileksystem officially in force across Turkey; the second is a custom tone-system of identical resolution dubbedYarman- 24cand devised by the corresponding author as a substitute. Our design features highlighted hover & play, dynamic perdelabeling, incremental transposition, maximal keystroke constrained polyphonic playback, and custom frequency data paste/apply capabilities. Subsequent implementations by developers might enhance our design with a glissando & vibrato effect, organ sound sustain, external synth patch load, and melody recording. Additionally, a test process to gather online statistics from visitors on their perceived success of how well the tunings render an assortment of well-knownmakam pieces could perhaps be considered in the future. We envision that our24-tone Makam Piano (v1.2)will be quite useful as a music theory web resource and possibly inspire similar upcoming microtonal HTML5 designs.AMS 2020 Subject Classification: 00A65, 97U80, 94A29, 90-10