Type the words. See where they fight the beat.
BY SONGDEED
Every songwriting book teaches prosody — putting the stressed syllable of a word where the music is strong — and no tool has ever checked it for you. Melisma does. Bring a melody in, or tap the rhythm with your finger, then type your lyric. Each syllable sits under the note it lands on, and where a word is accented on the wrong syllable, the mark is on that syllable. It will even sing the line back to you.
Coming soon to the App Store iPhone & iPadNot a warnings list somewhere else. Each syllable sits under its own note, with a dot above for the stress and a coloured line below for how badly it clashes — “forever” is accented on the wrong syllable, said in plain English.
Import MIDI or MusicXML from any DAW or notation app — or from Filigree, Contrapunctus, Mediant and Continuo. No melody yet? Tap the rhythm of the line with your finger. Many lyricists have a cadence long before they have notes.
Not a beep per syllable. Melisma builds each syllable from its actual vowel and consonant, so you hear where the accents land — with the playhead lighting each syllable in time. Toggle to a plain tone whenever you want the rhythm alone.
Perfect, family, additive, assonance and consonance — graded from pronunciation, not from matching letters. Tap any word in any line to rhyme from it, not just the one you finished last.
An engraved staff with the words underneath. Export MusicXML for NoteFlight, MuseScore or Dorico; MIDI with the syllables as lyric events; the plain words; or the whole project, losslessly.
One small payment. No subscription, no ads, no account, no sign-in. It works with the phone in airplane mode, and it collects nothing — the lyric never leaves your device.
Say forever out loud and the middle syllable is the strong one. Put that word so the first syllable lands on the downbeat and a singer will stumble every time — the music is telling them to accent a syllable the word does not accent. It is the most common fault in an amateur lyric and the hardest to hear in your own writing, because you already know how the line is supposed to go.
Melisma reads each word's pronunciation from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary — 126,000 words, with the stress marked on every syllable — lines it up against the metric strength of the notes underneath, and grades every clash mild, notable or severe. It will not flag syncopation. Putting a stressed syllable on an offbeat is normal and good and most of popular music. What it flags is the music accenting the wrong syllable of a word, which is a different thing entirely.
When it meets a word it does not know — a name, a coinage, a piece of dialect — it says so with a dotted underline rather than guessing quietly. Tap it, set the stress yourself, and it remembers, in this song and every song after.
The category leader's reviews are full of lost tens of hours of work. So this is not treated as plumbing. Every song is saved as you type, keeps its last five versions, and is written atomically — a crash mid-save leaves the previous version whole rather than half a file. A damaged record is repaired and opened, never withheld. An app update cannot cost you a song, and that is tested against records written by builds older than most of the app.
And because iPhone is entitled to reclaim a web app's storage when the device runs low, Melisma keeps a second copy of every song outside that storage, in its own Documents folder — which is never purged and which travels in your device backup. Your songs survive a full phone, and they come back when you set up a new one.
Type who else wrote it. When the song is done, Finalize marks it — and offers to lock the split with everyone named, while the room is still the room. It carries the title, the writers' names and the date. Never the lyric. A split sheet needs who and how much, not the words, and sending the words would cost the privacy claim for nothing.
Also from Songdeed: Filigree, for the melody itself — then Mediant for the chords and Continuo for the bassline.