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reference-tracks

A spec for turning "a song like Stairway to Heaven crossed with Highway to Hell" into a generator-ready prompt, without naming any artist.

details

status
paused
group
music
stack
Designed as an MCP server (Python), YAML song-DNA records, rules plus one LLM call
since
2026-06

readme

AI music generators filter artist and song names, and name-dropping prompts poorly anyway. This is the layer that de-references a named song into its musical DNA (key, tempo, structure, instrumentation, production, vocal character) and blends two or more into one prompt.

Fully specified and ready to build.

The decisions I locked in

  1. A hybrid blend engine. Deterministic rules enforce coherence: they resolve key, tempo and structure instead of averaging two songs into sludge. One LLM call does the creative fusion and writes the final prose.
  2. MCP first. The first user is an AI assistant calling two tools, get_song_dna and blend. Selling to the generator companies comes later.
  3. Start with knowledge, not signal processing. v1 is about 50 famous, well-documented songs with descriptors written by an LLM and refined by hand. Audio analysis waits until the canon needs to scale.

MVP scope

In: the curated canon, the two tools, the hybrid engine, a Suno prompt formatter, and a live demo where the blended prompt produces a track that actually sounds like the blend.

Out, on purpose: analyzing arbitrary tracks, audio feature extraction, an automated validation loop, and formats for other generators.

Pairs with songprint: one handles the sound, the other the words.