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Open methodology · CC BY 4.0

Voice-Reference Discipline

Inspiration is reference; imitation is theft. Here is the five-layer discipline that keeps that line clean.

Sacred Accident #15 in the SongForgeAI design log.

What’s a Sacred Accident?A discipline this codebase operates under that surfaced from a WAR Room verdict — not a feature, not a marketing line. There are 15 of them; SA#15 governs how we use named-artist references in the writing room.

The principle

Every craft discipline operates by reference. Writers study writers. Painters study painters. Songwriters study songwriters. The MFA syllabus says read Mary Oliver because Mary Oliver wrote elegies that survive being heard once at a graveside — and the student writing an elegy needs to know what that craft bar looks like.

SongForgeAI’s writing room does the same thing. When the room drafts a memorial song, it writes alongside a curated panel of voices — hymn writers, elegy poets, grief-aware contemporary singer-songwriters. 58 voices across the two life-event verticals. The panel teaches the room the register; the room writes the song.

What we do NOT do: name these voices in delivered output, claim association with them in marketing, or forge under their identity. The reference is internal tooling; the deliverable is original work.

The five-layer enforcement

Layer 1

The prompt forbids it

The forge prompt’s SYSTEM_RULES say: “No ‘in the style of [famous artist]’ framing in the styleString. Use genre + instrument + mood + era tags only.” The voice-roster panel block frames the names as voices the room writes ALONGSIDE, never imitates, never references by name in the lyric.

src/lib/life-songs/forge.ts
Layer 2

The refine prompt re-states it

Heirloom refinement carries its own discipline: “No ‘in the style of [artist name]’ framing — neither in the lyric nor in the styleString.” A second layer in case the forge pass missed it.

src/lib/life-songs/refine.ts
Layer 3

The cold-reader audits it

After refine, a vertical-specific cold reader walks the lyric as a grieving family member at the service (memorial) or a guest at the wedding. Lines that read as “borrowed artist register” get flagged for rewrite.

src/lib/life-songs/cold-readers/{memorial,wedding}.ts
Layer 4

The roster scanner verifies it

An automated module-load-indexed scanner checks the delivered lyric + style string against 58 canonical names + their distinctive last-name fragments. Word-boundary matching, case- insensitive, with explicit false-positive blocklists for ambiguous fragments. Test-covered.

src/lib/life-songs/scan-roster-leakage.ts
Layer 5

The scanner auto-rewrites hits

Any hit triggers a focused rewrite call: one Claude pass to strip the offending names while preserving the rest of the lyric. The rewrite is verified by re-scanning; accepted only when zero leaks remain.

src/lib/life-songs/refine.ts (rewriteToStripRosterNames)

What the discipline is NOT

  • ×Not “in the style of [artist].” A song inspired by Mary Oliver’s elegy register is still its own song with its own images.
  • ×Not a training-set claim. The voice roster is prompt-time reference, not training data. We do not train models on copyrighted recordings.
  • ×Not a marketing claim. We never advertise a song as “Bruce Springsteen-style” or “Sara Bareilles-style.” The /memorial + /wedding pages explicitly state this in “What this is not.”
  • ×Not voice-cloning. The deceased is never voice-cloned. Living artists are never imitated. The discipline holds across both verticals.

Who’s on the rosters

Two curated rosters, 58 voices total. The full list with the contribution reason for each entry lives in the source code, viewable on GitHub:

Memorial roster

29 voices

Hymn writers · elegy poets · grief-aware contemporary songwriters

Wedding roster

29 voices

Vow / ceremony poets · tradition-music lineage · contemporary tender songwriters

CC BY 4.0

Fork this methodology

This page + the scanner + the roster file structure are licensed under CC BY 4.0. If you build a tool that uses named reference voices in prompt-time craft tooling, you’re welcome to fork the pattern. Attribution with a link back is appreciated.

Companion open artifacts under the same license: Lyric Scoring Standard and Banned Clichés List.

What this means if you’re a buyer

  • Your song is its own work. No artist name appears in the lyric, the style string, the title, or the audio.

  • The craft bar is set by the right reference panel for your stance + tradition + setting. A memorial song gets hymn-writers and elegy-poets in the room; a wedding gets vow-shaped poets and ceremony-music composers.

  • The discipline is mechanically verifiable, not just aspirational. The scanner runs on every heirloom; any hit auto-rewrites before delivery.

  • You own the song outright. No artist holds a claim because no artist’s identity was used in production.