Makam

A web app that renders Turkish makam music as tab for fretless bass, guitar, violin, or oud — with decimal fret positions that preserve full 53-TET microtonal detail — and plays it back with Web Audio.

Run

# One-time: grab the corpus (only needed if you want to rebuild bundles)
git clone https://github.com/MTG/SymbTr.git SymbTr-2.4
node build-index.js          # parses txt/* -> songs.json + data/<makam>.bin

# Serve
python3 -m http.server 8000

The repo only ships songs.json (~420 KB) and data/*.bin (~7 MB, 155 makam bundles). The raw SymbTr corpus isn't tracked — it's build-time input.

Instruments

4-string bass (EADG), 6-string bass (BEADGC), guitar (EADGBE), violin (GDAE), oud (D-A-B-E-A-D).

How it works

• Each Koma53 integer in SymbTr gives a 53-TET pitch; midi = 72 + (koma − 318) × 12/53 keeps Turkish commas (~22.64¢) exact instead of rounding to quarter-tones.
• The app picks a string for the selected instrument and computes fret = midi − openStringMidi. Fractional frets render as 4.5, 7.33, etc.
• Bundles are per-makam, fetched on first song-select and cached — switching songs within a makam is zero-network.
• Playback uses Web Audio oscillators at the exact microtonal frequency with per-instrument timbres.