music
Developer(s)eWater  Australia
Stable release
4.0 / November 2010
Operating systemMicrosoft Windows
TypeUrban Drainage software
LicenseProprietary
Websitehttp://www.music4water/

music (Model for Urban Stormwater Improvement Conceptualisation) is designed to help urban stormwater professionals visualise possible strategies to tackle urban stormwater hydrology and pollution impacts.

Development History

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Research by Dr Tony Wong and colleagues at Monash University and eWater’s forerunner organisation, the CRC for Catchment Hydrology, identified that urban water professionals needed a decision support system to evaluate treatment measures and strategies if urban stormwater quality was to be improved.

Fundamental to this was research that showed that treatment of nearly all urban stormwater systems could be simulated using one model, the ‘universal stormwater treatment model’. This breakthrough, combined with a detailed understanding of the hydrology and pollutants of urban areas, gave Dr Wong’s team the necessary building blocks that became music.

The music development team focused on having a tool that, though easy to use, was underlain by high quality science. Dr Wong recognised that the science of estimating water quality had tended to become event-based and deterministic, whereas the quality of urban stormwater really depends on the statistical outcome of many rainfall events interacting with a handful of physical and chemical processes. If this ‘actuarial approach’ could be captured with an appropriate algorithm, calculations would be much simplified.

The hydrology inside music, developed by Francis Chiew and colleagues in the CRC for Catchment Hydrology, is based on defining an impervious area and the properties of related pervious areas. Once this is done, the runoff from an area can be estimated. More and more, confident estimates of hydrology are becoming as important as estimating water quality. Changes in urban hydrology can have major impacts on the health of streams, as work by Associate Professor Tim Fletcher (a member of the music development team) and colleagues at Monash University has shown.

Previous Versions

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  • Version 3 introduced life-cycle costing, rainwater tanks and infiltration basins
  • Version 2 extended the features and provided export options

Current Version

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Version 4.0 includes new features that improve flexibility, functionality and usability. music v4 provides more powerful modeling of bioretention and inflitation systems, the flexibility to model heavy metals and other pollutants, as well as simpler calibration tools. The software provides even better support for water sensitive urban design (WSUD) and integrated urban water management (IUWM) objectives. Additonally music v4 incorporates the latest science from Monash University and the Facility for Advancing Water Biofiltration (FAWB) and is designed to provide the highest level of confidence when modelling urban stormwater solutions.

music v4 can simulate urban stormwater systems ranging from a suburban block up to a whole town or suburb (0.01 km2 to 100km2). The time scale can start at 6 minutes and stretch up to 24 hours.

The latest features and upgrades in music v4 include: Bioretention Media filtration Infiltration Improved user interface Six minute timestep Stormwater harvesting Continuously stirred tank reactors Stormwater reuse Storage-discharge Life cycle cost Gross Pollutant Trap Modelling pollutants

Support Community

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References

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