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Cue is a browser-based drum machine demonstration in which a song is stored as structured Sanity content and its sound is synthesized in the browser. Its public “Floor” plays the published song, while a Sanity-powered “Deck” lets an editor change and preview a draft before publishing it.
What Cue is—and what it is not
Developer Fadhlullah Mustapha built Cue as a Sanity Challenge project. Rather than playing a collection of audio files, Cue uses data in Sanity documents to describe the music and the parameters for its sounds. The browser uses those parameters to synthesize the drum sounds.
In other words, the dataset is the musical state: it holds what to play and how the voices should sound. The resulting audio is generated by the browser. The project is software, not a physical drum machine, and its description does not identify any hardware as necessary.
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How the Floor and Deck work
The Floor plays the published version
The Floor is the public listening page. In Mustapha’s account, it reads the published perspective without a token, listens for changes through Sanity’s client.listen(), and polls every two seconds as a fallback. A Floor client does not hear an editor’s unpublished changes.
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The Deck edits and previews a draft
The Deck is a Sanity App SDK application for editing and previewing a draft. Mustapha describes it using useEditDocument to make draft changes and publishDocument to publish them. The separation gives an editor a way to work on a change before making it the version heard on the Floor.
Mustapha frames the distinction like a DJ monitoring a cue in headphones while the room hears the published track. On a Drop—the project’s name for publishing—the open Floor clients move to the new song at the next bar line.
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How a song is represented in Sanity
Cue’s schema separates the reusable sound definitions from the arrangement and its individual hits. Song sections, lanes, and steps are embedded in the song document; lanes refer to voice documents.
| Data element | What it contains | Role in Cue |
|---|---|---|
| Voice document | Name, kind, pitch, decay, tone, and gain | Defines a sound voice and is referenced by a lane. |
| Song document | Title, BPM, swing, and sections | Holds the song and its embedded arrangement. |
| Section | Title, kind, bars, and lanes | Groups part of the arrangement. |
| Lane | A voice reference and steps | Places a voice into the arrangement. |
| Step | An index from 0 to 15, velocity, probability, and timing nudge in milliseconds | Describes an individual rhythmic event and its variations. |
Why the patterns are embedded in the song
Mustapha keeps sections, lanes, and steps inside one song document so a publication carries a coherent arrangement. If the patterns were separate referenced documents, publishing the song alone would not automatically publish those pattern documents; the result could pair a new song with patterns still in draft. Embedding the patterns avoids that split publication state.
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Voice documents remain references because Mustapha treats them as a shared kit that changes less often. This is a different kind of data: an arrangement is expected to publish as one unit, while a sound definition can be reused across songs.
Why Cue uses step objects rather than a pattern string
A compact string can encode a sequence, but Cue represents each step as an object with its own fields. That makes musical details queryable: a query can find off-beat hits and examine their velocity, probability, or timing nudge. The structured representation makes those properties addressable data rather than information that must first be decoded from characters.
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What the reported timing does—and does not—show
Mustapha reports that a publish was noticed after 1.4 to 1.9 seconds. He also reports that, at 118 BPM, the new song began on the next bar, about 3.2 seconds after publishing. These are his measurements, described as taken in real Chrome against the live dataset—not a Sanity performance statistic or an independently verified guarantee. The account gives no repeat count or broader benchmark method, so the figures should be read as observations from this project rather than expected latency for other applications.
Where to see the project
Mustapha’s October 4, 2026 DEV Community article, “Cue: a drum machine whose song is a Sanity dataset”, describes the project and links to a public demo and a Deck that requires Sanity organization sign-in. The article’s description is an account of the submission; it does not establish whether those links remain available or behave the same way now.
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