What it is
Story Map is a planning surface for music with a shape. Instead of a flat arrangement, you lay out your project as a story: a vision and a guiding sentence at the top, a sequence of chapters below, recurring motifs that thread through them, and an energy arc that shows the journey from opening to peak. Every field is a starting point, never locked — chapters can be added, reordered, and rewritten as the music tells you what it wants.
Five kinds of project
It opens with templates tuned to how the work is really made — each just a scaffold you edit freely:
- Set: a DJ/live journey: Opening, First depth, Rising, Peak, and beyond.
- Album: a collection with a through-line across tracks.
- Collab: chapters carry an ayni pair: who leads, what they bring, what they receive.
- Remix: a re-telling of someone else's story.
- Track: a single piece, mapped section by section.
What a chapter holds
Each chapter is richer than a marker. It carries an emotion, a tempo and rhythmic feel, the role of the bass, the harmony, a nature element, influences, a visual palette, and how it transitions in, plus a status of planned, growing, or done. It's a place to think about why a section exists before reaching for a device or instrument.
Motifs
Named, symbol-marked threads with their own lane colour, so you can see a recurring idea move through the whole piece.
Energy arc
A start and end BPM and an energy curve — the emotional topography of the set at a glance.
Sound library
An additive section for seeds, ideas, rendered sounds, and outside references (a link, a WAV), each optionally homed to a chapter or motif.
Vocabulary
A running glossary of the language and sources a project draws from — its private lexicon.
How it's built
The core is pure TypeScript — data model, templates, validation, layout, and a Markdown read-back — with no SDK and no I/O, which makes it fully unit-testable on its own. On top sits the Ableton Extensions SDK integration and a pluggable store: plans can live locally under the extension's storage, or sync through a Waves-backed store. The schema is versioned and forward-compatible, so plans written before a feature existed keep loading unchanged.
Even the Universe had to learn how to dance