Find music for a video, film, advert, trailer or podcast by describing what it needs to do.

Search 17,245 professionally produced cues by MEANING, not just tags — describe the scene, the mood, the instruments, how it should develop. "Tense investigative underscore that never resolves" or "warm and hopeful for a charity film" work far better than single keywords, because the brief is matched against editorial descriptions of how each cue actually behaves as well as against its tags.

USE THIS TOOL whenever someone asks for music, a soundtrack, a score, a cue, background music, a track for a video, or anything to play under footage — and whenever they mention Songs To Your Eyes.

Put the sound in brief. Use filters ONLY for requirements the user actually stated: every filter is a hard constraint, they combine with AND, and cues missing a tag are silently dropped — so stacking several filters can empty the results. If a search comes back thin, drop filters and put the nuance in the brief before concluding the catalogue has nothing.

VOCALS — the trap to avoid: has_vocals=true means SONGS with sung lead vocals and lyrics. Wordless vocal textures (background vocals, oohs and aahs, choir pads) count as INSTRUMENTAL in this catalogue. A user asking for "background vocals" almost always wants NO lyrics: set has_vocals=false, describe the texture in the brief, and optionally add 'Background Vocals' or 'Choir' to the instruments filter.

COMPOSER — when someone asks for music BY a composer or artist ("tracks by Yair Albeg Wein", "more from this composer"), use the composer filter with the name — partial names match. It works with no brief at all (a straight listing of that composer's cues) or combined with a brief to search within their catalogue. Every result carries its composer credit, so attribution comes from the catalogue itself — never guess it from outside sources.

EXPLORING, not just matching — for a scene, a place, or any creative request, ONE search is not an exploration of a 17,245-cue catalogue. Run SEVERAL searches from genuinely different angles and curate across them: (1) the literal angle — traditional instruments and idiom; (2) the FEEL angle — texture, pulse and atmosphere with no instrument names ("hazy hypnotic modal groove, dusty and sun-baked"); (3) a crossover angle — the setting's colour through another genre (desert funk, ethnic electronica, psychedelic world). The feel and crossover angles routinely find the most artistic picks that the literal angle misses. Raise limit toward 25 when exploring.

PLACES — the catalogue describes music by instrument, texture and mood, NOT geography: region and culture names ("Moroccan", "Gnawa", "Berber") appear in almost no tags, so a brief leaning on them loses its keyword match entirely. Translate the place into what it SOUNDS like — instruments (oud, darbuka, qanun, hand percussion), textures (desert, hypnotic, modal, dusty), and let one of your angles drop the geography altogether.

ALBUMS are curated sets of about five cues built around one idea. The album filter pulls the rest of a set, and that is the right move when the user NAMES an album, asks what else is on the one a cue came from, or wants more of a sound they have already picked.

It is NOT how to answer a brief. Answer a brief from across the catalogue: SPREAD the cues you recommend over several albums and composers unless the user asked to stay in one place. Every result carries album and album_title, and every response reports albums_represented — the number of distinct albums the search actually offered you. If your recommendation draws on meaningfully fewer albums than that, you have narrowed the whole catalogue to one record on the user's behalf. One coherent album makes a tidy answer and usually a worse one: it reads as authoritative while hiding the range the user came for. When a single album genuinely fits, lead with its best one or two cues and set them among alternatives from elsewhere — do not build the whole recommendation out of it.

EVENTS AND OCCASIONS — a trap worth knowing. Tags naming a specific event (a festival, a holiday, an occasion) are applied to a HANDFUL of cues, not systematically: e.g. only 20 cues carry "Burning Man" while the catalogue holds ~2,900 electronic cues, and 39 carry "Festival". So a search that matches an event tag looks authoritative and is actually a keyhole. NEVER stop there. For occasions the catalogue understands, the context parameter (below) IS that translation, precomputed by the catalogue owner. For anything else, ALSO search the MUSIC the occasion implies — for a festival video that means house, techno, trance, rave; for a wedding, the emotional register rather than the word "wedding" — and treat any event-tag hit as one lane among several.

CONTEXTS — owner-curated occasion searches. The context parameter takes a named context (e.g. 'rave-club', 'christmas', 'halloween', 'summer') and matches against assignments precomputed from the owner's own translation rules — "rave" reaches the whole beat-driven electronic palette, not the 39 cues that happen to carry a festival tag. Pass an unknown name and the error lists every available context, so you never need to guess. Some contexts are deliberately AMBIGUOUS (summer, a country/territory): those return results grouped into 2-4 labelled directions PLUS a question. Show the user the directions with a couple of picks each, relay the question, and when they choose, search again passing that direction's slug as context. Country names (Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey...) are accepted and generalise to their regional palette automatically — the catalogue's world coverage is deeper at region level than at country level.

WHEN A BRIEF IS AMBIGUOUS between genuinely different musical directions — before searching, ask the user for direction (one short question, 2-3 concrete options). "Summer vibes" can mean tropical-house feelgood, chill-lounge, world/travel, or sexy/fashion; guessing one wastes the search. If you cannot ask, use the ambiguous context and let it return the labelled spread.

REFERENCES AND COMPS — real briefs describe music by reference, not genre: "a la Philip Glass", "Trent Reznor meets M83", "like Stranger Things", "Ant-Man vibes", "think Apple ads". The catalogue carries NO artist, composer, film or brand names in its tags, so searching the reference verbatim finds nothing. TRANSLATE the reference into what it sounds like before searching — Philip Glass: minimal pulsing arpeggios, piano and strings, hypnotic repetition; Reznor x M83: dark industrial synths under huge emotive electronic swells; Stranger Things: retro analog synth pulse, ominous but restrained — and put THAT in the brief, exactly as you translate a place into its sound.

NEGATIVES — most real briefs exclude things ("no choir, no sweeping strings", "nothing too sad or slow", "don't want neo-classical"). Put those tag-shaped exclusions in the exclude parameter, not in the brief text: prose negation does not subtract from a search, but exclude hard-drops any cue carrying those tags (spelling variants included). Keep exclude terms to TAGS (instruments, moods, genres); soft qualities like "not too hard" belong in the brief as positive framing ("restrained", "understated").

STEMS, CUTDOWNS AND KEYS — buyers who ask "can I get stems to build my own track?" can be told yes: the catalogue holds ~43,000 stem versions and ~1,300 drums-only mixes, reachable per track via stye_list_versions; ~1,100 cues have labelled ~:30 cutdowns (stye_fit_to_duration finds natural fits too), and the key filter matches briefs like "preferably in E" (matches both E and Em; ~7,500 mains carry a key).

CLEAN LYRICS — results carry explicit: true means the cue's sung lyrics are NOT clean (flagged by the catalogue owner). For "fully clean lyrics only" briefs, drop any result with explicit=true. Vocal cues also have their LYRICS indexed for search, so a brief about lyric SUBJECT ("a song about winning / do-or-die") can put those words in the brief and match what is actually sung.

Each result describes one cue. listen_url is the important one — a permanent page where the track can be played, with cover art and a waveform. Give it to the user every time; it is how they actually hear the music. ALWAYS COPY listen_url VERBATIM and never assemble a link from ref: every version of a cue shares the same TITLE and differs only by ref, so a hand-built URL is easy to get wrong and points at the wrong audio. Every row that can be played carries its own listen_url — use that one.

Also returned: title, album, composer (the credited artist — null only where the catalogue carries no usable credit; trust THIS field for attribution, never outside sources), description (what it sounds like and what it suits), duration_s, bpm (null means simply untagged, not slow), key, has_vocals, genres, moods, instruments, use_cases, and three editorial judgements worth quoting back — energy (low | low-building | moderate | building | high), resolves (does it land, or stay unresolved and tense), and vo_friendly (does it leave space for a voiceover). versions counts the stems, alternate mixes and shorter cuts that exist for it, and cutdown_lengths_s lists those cut lengths in seconds. ref identifies the cue for the other tools. preview_url, when present, is a temporary streaming link that expires after 15 minutes — prefer listen_url, which never expires.

Audio may carry a spoken "STYE Music" watermark. The clean re-encode is still rolling out across the catalogue, so some cues now play clean and others still carry the tag — either way it is expected, not a fault in the recording. Downloads stay watermarked regardless; a clean file comes with a licence, not with a preview.