How much text makes how long a song
The lyrics box takes 5,000 characters, and the median paste runs to about fifty sung lines — longer than most people guess, because pastes usually arrive with every chorus written out. What comes back follows what goes in: the engine sings your lines in order at roughly four seconds a line and adds instrumental room around them, so a short text is not padded out to song length. It comes back short.
| Sung lines you paste | Median song | How it reads |
|---|---|---|
| 8 or fewer | 1:09 | Short: about as long as the words take to sing |
| 9 to 16 | 2:11 | One pass of your words, with room for an intro and an ending |
| 17 to 31 | 2:30 | A verse-and-chorus song, still short of three minutes |
| 32 to 39 | 3:00 | Three minutes: a full song with the choruses written out |
| 40 to 59 | 3:29 | The common case: the median paste lands here |
| 60 to 79 | 4:15 | Past four minutes |
| 80 or more | 4:36 | Longer again, but more slowly: lines past eighty add little |
The practical reading: if you want a longer song, more lines is the lever — a second verse, a bridge, the chorus written out each time it returns — or set a length on Pro. If a song came back shorter than you hoped, count the sung lines before blaming the engine: thirty-odd lines is about three minutes.
Two texts, exactly as they were pasted
Neither of these is song-shaped. The first is a list — fifty-four country names, typed as a list, with no rhyme and no chorus. The second is a script: a punk song written with the arrangement in brackets before each section, in Polish.
The prompt that made it
“Africa, Africa, sing the names with me, / Fifty-four countries from sea to sea. / Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, / Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, / Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Congo, / Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt we know. / Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, / Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, / Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, / Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi. / Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Moro”
A pasted list of African countries, 2:29. It came back as verses with a hook, and the brief itself was cut off mid-list by the old 400-character description box — it takes 2,000 now.
The prompt that made it
“[Global settings - Tempo 100 BPM, Key / Scale F# minor, Time Signature 4/4] [Intro - short dirty guitar riff, isolated snare] [Drop - explosive punk guitar riff, full band] Dobra, no dobra, dwa, trzy… [Verse 1 - tight punk groove, choppy guitar riff] Dobra (dobra), będzie dobrze już …”
3:14. The bracketed lines set tempo, key and what each section does; they steer the arrangement and are not sung. Only the Polish lines between them are.
About six in ten texts pasted here carry section markers like [Verse] or [Coro]; the rest are plain text and the engine decides the shape. About one in four goes further, like the second example, and writes directions in brackets — an instrument, a mood, a tempo — which steer the performance instead of being sung.
Text that was never meant to be sung
A birthday message, a letter, a paragraph from a speech: all of it works, but very few people paste prose — fewer than one text in twenty arrives as a paragraph. It is worth breaking it up before you press Create, because line breaks are the only structure the engine can see.
- Put each thought on its own line. A line break is where a sung phrase can end.
- Repeat the line you want remembered, twice, in the same words — that is what turns it into a chorus.
- Cut the throat-clearing. The first line is the opening of the song, not the opening of a letter.
- Keep names and places exactly as they should be sung; the engine sings the spelling, so write an unusual name the way it sounds.
Any script, not just this one
More than one in five pasted texts here is not in the Latin alphabet: 9% arrive in Arabic script, 3% in Cyrillic, 3% in Chinese, Japanese or Korean and 2% in Devanagari. Paste in your own script and it is sung in your own language. If the reading comes out wrong, add the language to the style line (“sung in Urdu”) rather than transliterating the words.
Before you paste
- One thought per line — line breaks are the structure
- The line you want remembered, repeated word for word
- Section markers if you want to control the shape; leave them out to let the engine choose
- Unusual names spelled the way they sound
- About thirty-five sung lines for three minutes, sixty for four
- A style line: genre, voice, tempo — and the language if the script could be read two ways
Sources
Written and fact-checked by the Tunely team · Updated