Rock Lyric System
“At rock altitude, the vowel must yield to the pitch.”
The first arc to ground a Sacred Accident in measurable formant physics. Above ~G4 chest voice, F0 collides with the structural formant of closed vowels — the singer reshapes mid-note, breaking the chorus payoff. The Vowel-Pitch Integrity primitive flags closed-vowel cliffs at chorus peaks. 5 substyles span classic-rock-radio → roots-heartland, each with its own VPI ceiling.
Try It — 76 starter prompts
Browse all 76 →Each prompt is hand-tuned to exercise the rock load-bearing axis. Click to start with the prompt pre-loaded into the forge.
Breaking Open the Silence
Stadium parking lot after the show, cigarette smoke mixing with exhaust fumes. Electric guitar feedback still ringing in your ears as you lean against a rusted van, questioning everything you thought you knew about where your life was heading. Open-vowel chorus peak on 'breaking' and 'silence' — the chest voice needs room to soar at 120 BPM.
Dive bar at 2am, the marshall stack humming with residual voltage while you tune your gibson sg. The bartender's counting register as you work through the chord progression that's been haunting you since your father's funeral. Chant gap on the pre-chorus — let the crowd fill those 'woah-oh' spaces.
Garage rehearsal space with concrete floors and no heat, three-piece band working through a riff-driven anthem about leaving everything behind. The lead guitar cuts through the mix like broken glass while the rhythm section locks into that pocket between regret and relief. Title generates verses through the statement-question-command matrix.
Basement of a friend's house, dusty Gibson SG propped against a 1976 amp that's seen better decades. Progressive rock structure with literary lyrics about finding your father's old setlist in a shoebox, each song title a breadcrumb leading back to who he was before he became just 'dad.' Open vowel chorus on 'archaeology' and 'memory.'
76 prompts in the rock catalog · Shuffle rotates the featured + 3 alternates together
Substyles · 5
Each substyle binds its own audit thresholds, craft paradigm, POV mode, and banned failure modes. The forge auto-detects the right substyle from your prompt and genre tag.
Audit primitives · 6 deterministic + 1 Haiku-judged▾
Each runs against every rock lyric the forge produces; the load-bearing primitive is highlighted.
| Code | Name | Role | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| VPI | Vowel-Pitch Integrity | Closed-vowel-on-chorus-peak collision rate (SA#27 axis) | DeterministicSA axis |
| RVL | Register-Vowel Landing | Chorus-wide open-vowel discipline | Deterministic |
| TTI | Title-Tension Index | Desmond Child/Mutt Lange title-tension scoring | Deterministic |
| RHC | Rhythmic Hook Contrast | Chorus rhythmically compressed vs verse | Deterministic |
| CWM | Concreteness Word Metric | Springsteen/Petty concreteness floor | Deterministic |
| GDD | Gap Design Density | Stadium response space (instrumental + short anthemic lines) | Deterministic |
| SPT | Stadium Participation Test | Haiku-judged 50,000-person-singalong test | Haiku |
Forbidden Archive · 10 failure modes
Each failure mode is cited by name in the forge prompt and flagged by the critic loop with section + reasoning. The full operational definitions live in the Forbidden Archive document.
Closed-Vowel Cliff
A closed front (/iy/ /ih/) or back (/uw/ /uh/) vowel landing on a chorus chest-voice peak — the singer reshapes the word mid-delivery to make it singable. SA#27's #1 failure: F0 collides with the structural formant and the chorus payoff breaks.
Example: "I FEEL it" or "I NEED you" on a chorus peak — peak vowel needs to be /ah/ /oh/ /ay/ /eh/ /ow/
Greedy Spot On Peak
A function word (articles, prepositions, "the / a / to / on") landing on a chorus downbeat. Pat Pattison's greedy-spot rule applied to rock: the structural beat reserved for the loaded word is occupied by a connective.
Tension-Less Title
A title without irony, paradox, or contradiction — the chorus payoff has no magnet. Great rock titles compress tension ("Born To Run," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Eye Of The Tiger"); flat titles have nothing to resolve.
Hook Shadowing
Hook keywords leaking into verses, eroding chorus payoff. The reveal-moment depends on the chorus hook landing fresh; shadowing dilutes the contrast and the chorus arrives already-spent.
Vocal Lift Absence
The chorus melody doesn't climb register from the verse — no commercial-rock build. The chorus arrives at the same altitude as the verse; the song never lifts off.
Chant Gap Absence
No wordless crowd-fill slots (woah-oh, hey-hey, ay-ay-ay) for the stadium to participate in. Rock's commercial form depends on audience completion; a chorus without chant gaps cannot be sung back at scale.
Concept Drift
The title doesn't generate the verses — the statement / question / command / desire matrix isn't applied. Each verse should extend the title's thesis; concept drift leaves the title floating, disconnected from the body.
Repetition Bloat
The title is repeated 10+ times without lyrical or melodic variation. Repetition is rock's tool, but bloat erodes the title's meaning — by the third chorus the listener stops hearing it.
Power-Ballad Mismatch
Slow, intimate lyrical content paired with a heavy arena-chorus arrangement (or vice versa) — tone-text contradiction. The lyric and the production envelope are arguing instead of reinforcing.
Authenticity Cosplay
Generic rock signifiers (motorcycle / leather / fire / rebellion / highway / outlaw) without lived specificity. The lyric collects rock vocabulary instead of inhabiting a particular rocker's actual life.
RockRadio
Top admin-published rock songs from the corpus. Click play to queue the lot — the player auto-advances through every track.
Calibrated against 30 verified hits
Audit primitives tuned so canonical rock hits score at the S+/S band — Rolling Stone 500, Grammy Hall of Fame, Library of Congress Registry, substyle-specific playlists. Corpus CC BY 4.0; titles + metadata only, no lyrics reproduced.
Forge a rock song
The forge applies the rock substyle profile, banned failure modes, and VPI as a pre-output gate. Output isn’t generic AI lyrics — it’s rock lyrics that pass the audit your genre demands.