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It checks whether your words sit right on your melody — whether the syllables you stress land where the music is strong. You bring a melody (or tap the rhythm), type your lyric, and Melisma marks every place a word is accented on the wrong syllable, along with rhyme, syllable counts and a score you can export.

Three ways. Import a MIDI or MusicXML file — from any DAW or notation app, or from Filigree, Contrapunctus, Mediant or Continuo; Melisma takes the top line. Tap the rhythm with the Tap rhythm button if you have a cadence but no notes yet. Or type the words first and add the music later.

An import replaces only the melody. If the open song already has a lyric, your words stay where they are.

No. Prosody is about where the notes fall, not what they are, so a tapped rhythm with no pitches at all is fully analysed. Pitches only matter for the notation, the export and the singing playback.

Drag a note up or down in the melody strip. For a bigger target, tap open the big view — the same contour on a full-height sheet with room to work on a touch screen. An imported melody already has its pitches and they are preserved exactly.

Each syllable sits under the note it lands on. A bright dot above means the word stresses that syllable. A coloured line underneath means something is off — the more orange, the more a singer will notice, and red is severe. Below each line, the faults are written out in words: which word, which syllable, and why.

Because it isn't a fault. Putting a stressed syllable on an offbeat is normal and good and most of popular music. What Melisma flags is the music accenting the wrong syllable of a word — for-ever instead of for-ev-er — which is the thing that makes a singer stumble.

That means Melisma is guessing. The word isn't in the pronouncing dictionary — usually a name, a coinage or a piece of dialect — so the stress is estimated from spelling. Tap it and set the stress yourself. It remembers, in this song and in every song after.

Some words genuinely have two, and which one is right depends on the sense — REcord the noun against reCORD the verb. Tap the word and Melisma offers the alternatives it knows about, so it's a choice rather than a guess. Anything you set is remembered.

That's a melisma, and it's what the app is named after. Mark it on the syllable and the following notes are absorbed into it rather than pulling the rest of the line out of alignment.

It approximates them. Melisma builds each syllable from its actual vowels and consonants rather than beeping once per note, so you hear where the accents land. It is deliberately a rough voice, not a singer — the point is to make the stress audible, and a synthetic voice that sounds like a person would distract from that. Tap Voice to switch between the articulated words and a plain tone.

Press it once more — iOS only allows audio to start after a tap. Melisma plays with the ringer switch either way. If it's still silent, check the volume with the app in the foreground, since iOS tracks media volume separately.

Lighting each syllable as it sounds, from the same alignment the marks come from. If a syllable lights on a beat that feels wrong, that is exactly the fault the mark underneath is describing.

Tap Rhymes and then tap whichever word you want to rhyme from — any word in any line, not just the last one you typed. Melisma grades matches as perfect, family, additive, assonance or consonance, from how the words are pronounced rather than how they're spelled, so love and move are not offered as a pair and enough and stuff are.

The rhyme scheme, worked out from the line endings — A, B, C and so on, with lines that rhyme sharing a letter.

Notation (.xml) — MusicXML with the words under the notes, for NoteFlight, MuseScore, Sibelius, Dorico or Finale. The rhythm is tidied onto the grid so it reads as a score. MIDI (.mid) — straight into a DAW, with your timing exactly as you played it and the syllables as lyric events. Words (.txt) — just the lyric. Project (.melisma) — everything, losslessly. That's the one that comes back in.

Deliberately. A tapped rhythm is unquantized on purpose — the feel is the point — so the MIDI keeps every onset exactly where you put it. But a score full of raw performance timings is unreadable, so the MusicXML snaps to the meter's subdivision, splits notes across barlines with ties, and fills the gaps with real rests. One is the performance; the other is the notation.

That's expected. The staff on screen is a quick preview; the XML export is the real thing, fully engraved and editable in your notation software.

It marks the song done — a status, not an export — and offers to lock the split with everyone you listed as a collaborator, which is worth doing while the room is still the room. Come back to a finalized song and Finalize tells you when it was finalized, whether the split was ever opened, and gives you a way to mark it unfinished again. Editing after finalizing versions the marker rather than silently keeping it.

The title, the collaborators' names and the date. Never the lyric. A split sheet needs who and how much, not the words. Nothing is sent in the background, ever — it happens only when you tap, and you can see exactly what it carries before you do.

No, and it's tested — the app is checked against records written by builds older than most of it, and every field survives. Songs written by a newer build open too, read as far as they can be and flagged, rather than withheld.

iPhone is entitled to reclaim a web app's storage when a device gets full, so Melisma keeps a second copy of every song in its own Documents folder, outside the part that can be reclaimed. If storage is ever purged, your songs are put back on the next launch and the app tells you it did. That folder also travels in your device backup, so your work comes across to a new phone.

Hundreds — a realistic eight-line song with an eighty-note melody is about 8 KB, and several hundred fit comfortably. If space ever does run out the app says so plainly and tells you what to do about it, rather than failing quietly.

Yes. Every song keeps its last five versions, and restoring one is itself undoable — recovering from the wrong backup must not destroy what you were trying to save.

No. Melisma is fully offline and requires no sign-in. It collects nothing.