Hokkien · POJ & Tâi-lô
Seven tones with sandhi preview. Toggle between POJ and Tâi-lô. Initial koa-á melody patterns.
For songwriters, translators & vocal coaches
Lead sheets,
with the language layer.
A lead-sheet editor that annotates lyrics the way a linguist would — pronunciation, stress, prosody, tone — alongside the chords. Now with Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hokkien support.
songscript.app · invite-only beta · indie writers always free
月光 — verse.songscript
Fm♩ 72● live
Verse · 月光 ("Moonlight")Key Fm · ♩ 72 · 4/4 · Mandarin
Refrain · "Mira"L1 · chord-led · English
L2 · + stressWatch where the downbeat lands
Hold the same bar. Stress marks appear above the stressed syllable — primary (′) and secondary (″). The editor uses these to warn you when an unstressed schwa lands on beat one.
L3 · + tone contourPinyin · Jyutping · POJ · superscript numerals
For tonal languages, Songscript layers tone contour above each character. Cantonese gets all six, Hokkien gets seven (with sandhi preview), Mandarin gets four plus neutral. The melody can be checked against the contour so a falling tone doesn't sit under a rising fifth.
L4 · + IPAWhat the singer actually sings
Phonemes appear below the syllable. Tap any vowel for its position in the language-specific vowel chart. Useful when matching vowels across a translation — keep /a/ over /a/, not /a/ over /ə/.
L5 · + inter-linear glossLeipzig conventions · for translators
Morpheme-level gloss under each syllable. Keep meter when the source language doesn't cooperate. Export the whole annotated sheet as PDF, MusicXML, or .songscript.
Supported languages
Built for tonal songs first. Anything else next.
Five languages shipping today. Twelve more in active research with native-speaker linguists.
LiveAaEnglishGenAm · RP · estuary
stressIPAgloss
Live中文Mandarin · 普通话Hanyu Pinyin · 4 tones + neutral
toneIPApinyingloss
Live粵語Cantonese · 廣東話Jyutping · 6 tones · checked syllables
toneIPAjyutpinggloss
Beta閩南Hokkien · 閩南話Pe̍h-ōe-jī · Tâi-lô · 7 tones + sandhi
toneIPAPOJsandhi
Beta日本語JapaneseHepburn · pitch accent · kana ↔ kanji
pitchIPAkana
Q3 · 26한국어KoreanRevised romanization · Hangul
IPAromanize
Q3 · 26TiếngVietnameseQuốc ngữ · 6 tones · diacritic-aware
toneIPA
Q4 · 26YorùbáYorùbá3-tone · downstep · ATR vowels
toneIPAdownstep
Q4 · 26EspañolEspañolCastilian · Rioplatense · vowel purity
stressIPA
Q1 · 27PortuguêsPortuguêsBR · PT · nasal vowel mapping
stressIPAnasals
Q1 · 27ภาษาไทยThaiRTGS · 5 tones · vowel length
toneIPA
Need a language we don't have?
If you're working with a native-speaker linguist, we'll prioritise the build. Twelve languages already in research.
What's different
Three things that aren't in your DAW or chord chart.
ˈσ
Stress & tone aware
Songscript breaks a lyric into singable syllables with primary, secondary stress — and for tonal languages, contour above each character. The downbeat won't land on an unstressed schwa, and a rising tone won't sit under a falling fifth.
/ɛ/
IPA you can hear
Hover a syllable, hold space. A trained vocal synth sings the exact phoneme over the chord that's playing. English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien live today; Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Yoruba in beta.
⇄
Translator's gloss, built in
Inter-linear morpheme gloss in Leipzig conventions, so a translator can keep the meter when the source language doesn't. Export as PDF, MusicXML, or .songscript.
A note from the makers
Songs aren't lyrics with chords stuck on top.
A great line lands twice — first on the beat, then on the vowel. Songwriters know this. Translators re-learn it on every project. Tone-language singers — Cantopop, Mandopop, Hokkien koa-á — have had to fight every tool we tried, because none of them modelled tone at all.
Songscript started as a private editor we built for a Cantopop-to-English adaptation in 2024. The constraint was brutal: keep the original melodic contour, keep the tone-melody agreement most listeners feel but don't name, write English that didn't sound translated. We needed a tool that thought about phonemes the way Logic thinks about MIDI.
What ships today is the editor we built for ourselves, generalised across five languages and counting. One canvas, five layers, every shortcut a working writer would expect. No AI co-writer. No "generate a chorus" button. Just better instruments.
"
The first tool that lets me see a Cantopop line the way I hear it in my head — chord, consonant and tone on the same staff.
— Test reader · vocal director, fictitious conservatory
Build notes
Recent
Cantonese · Jyutping
Six tones plus checked syllables. Tone-melody mismatch warnings tuned for Cantopop.
Mandarin · Pinyin
Four tones plus neutral. Per-character pinyin with tone-mark and superscript numeral views.
MusicXML round-trip export
Open a Sibelius or Dorico file, annotate, send it back without losing your engraving.
Beta access
Free for indie writers. Forever.
Studio & institution tiers ship in the fall — pricing when there's something to charge for, not before.