Searches the Songs To Your Eyes production-music catalogue for cues that fit a brief for a video, film, advert, trailer or podcast: music to license for a project, or anything about the Songs To Your Eyes catalogue.
The brief is matched by MEANING against an editorial description of how each cue behaves
as well as against its tags, so a described scene, mood, instrumentation or arc ("tense
investigative underscore that never resolves", "warm and hopeful for a charity film")
matches far better than a single keyword.
LISTENING. Each result carries listen_url, a permanent public page where that cue plays.
It is the only way a person can hear a cue: a cue listed without its listen_url cannot be
auditioned. This holds for every list, an album listing included.
PRIVACY. When a brief has not been searched before, its text is sent to Google's Gemini
API to interpret it; no identifier is sent.
FILTERS. Every filter is a hard constraint. Filters combine with AND, and a cue missing
the tag a filter tests is excluded, so several filters together can empty a page. The
brief carries soft qualities without excluding anything.
PAGES. One call returns one page of up to 25 cues (default 15); there is no pagination,
and identical arguments return identical cues. A different brief, or the same need
phrased from a different angle, returns different cues.
VOCALS. has_vocals=true selects songs with sung lead vocals and lyrics. Wordless vocal
textures (background vocals, oohs and aahs, choir pads) are classed as instrumental,
has_vocals=false; a request for "background vocals" is almost always a request for no
lyrics. Texture words in the brief ("background vocals", "choir", "vocal hooks", "group
singing") are detected server-side and applied as a hard requirement, so every result
carries that texture and a short page reflects the catalogue's actual supply of it.
COMPOSERS. The composer filter matches the credited composer by partial name, with or
without a brief (with none, it lists that composer's cues). Each result's `composer` field
is the catalogue's own writer credit.
ANGLES. A page reflects one phrasing of a brief. Phrasings from different angles reach
different parts of the whole catalogue: the literal angle (traditional instruments and idiom), the
feel angle (texture, pulse and atmosphere with no instrument names, e.g. "hazy hypnotic
modal groove, dusty and sun-baked") and the crossover angle (the setting's colour through
another genre: desert funk, ethnic electronica, psychedelic world). The feel and crossover
angles routinely surface the most distinctive picks, which a literal phrasing misses.
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 built on them loses its keyword match, while the sound of the place (oud, darbuka,
qanun, hand percussion; desert, hypnotic, modal, dusty) matches.
ALBUMS. Albums are curated sets of about five cues built around one idea. A general search
returns at most two cues per album (max_per_album) so that a page spans the catalogue, and
`albums_represented` reports how many distinct albums the page drew on. The album filter
returns a whole set and lifts that cap. A recommendation built from a single album shows
one record's take on a brief rather than the catalogue's range.
EVENTS AND OCCASIONS. Tags naming a specific event (a festival, a holiday, an occasion)
are on a handful of cues, not applied systematically: only 20 cues carry "Burning Man"
while the catalogue holds ~1,900 electronic cues, and
39 carry "Festival". An event-tag match is therefore a narrow slice. The music an occasion
implies reaches much further: house, techno, trance and rave for a festival; the
emotional register, rather than the word, for a wedding.
CONTEXTS. The `context` parameter runs an owner-curated occasion search ('rave-club',
'christmas', 'halloween', 'summer' and others) against assignments precomputed from the
catalogue owner's translation rules: "rave" reaches the whole beat-driven electronic
palette, not just the cues that carry a festival tag. An unknown name returns the full
list of valid contexts. Country names (Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey...) are accepted and
generalise to their regional palette, where the catalogue's world coverage is deeper. Some
contexts are ambiguous (summer, a country or territory): they return results grouped into
2-4 labelled directions, each with its own slug, plus a question that tells them apart;
that slug passed as `context` returns the one direction.
AMBIGUOUS BRIEFS. Some briefs span genuinely different musical directions: "summer vibes"
can mean tropical-house feelgood, chill-lounge, world/travel or sexy/fashion. A single
search commits to one reading; the ambiguous contexts return the labelled spread.
REFERENCES. The catalogue's tags carry no artist, composer, film or brand names, so a
reference searched verbatim ("a la Philip Glass", "like Stranger Things", "think Apple
ads") finds little, while a description of its sound matches: Philip Glass is minimal
pulsing arpeggios, piano and strings, hypnotic repetition; Trent Reznor meets M83 is dark
industrial synths under huge emotive electronic swells; Stranger Things is a retro analog
synth pulse, ominous but restrained.
NEGATIVES. Negation written into the brief does not subtract from a search. The `exclude`
parameter hard-drops any cue carrying the listed tags, spelling variants included. It
takes tag-shaped terms (instruments, moods, genres); soft qualities ("not too hard")
match better as positive wording in the brief ("restrained", "understated").
STEMS, CUTDOWNS AND KEYS. The catalogue holds ~44,000
stem versions and ~2,800 drums-only stems, and
~1,100 cues have a labelled :30 cutdown; each
result's `versions` counts what exists for that cue. The `key` filter matches briefs like
"preferably in E" (E matches both E and Em); ~7,200 mains
carry a key.
CLEAN LYRICS. `explicit`: true means the catalogue owner has flagged the cue's sung lyrics
as not clean.
LYRICS. 328 cues have lyrics on file, and the lyrics are in the full-text index, so words
that are actually sung match. Matching is by wording, not subject: "a song about winning"
finds lyrics containing "winning", not every song about victory. The catalogue is
overwhelmingly instrumental, so a lyric match is a narrow slice on top of the musical
match.
RESULTS. Each result describes one cue. listen_url is a permanent public page where the
cue plays, with cover art and a waveform: it is how a person actually hears the music.
Every playable row carries its own listen_url. The versions of a cue share one title and
differ only by ref, so a link built by hand from a title or a ref can point at the wrong
audio.
Also returned: title, album, album_title, composer (the catalogue's own writer credit),
description (what it sounds like and what it suits), duration_s, bpm, key, has_vocals,
explicit, genres, moods, instruments, use_cases, keywords (extra catalogue tags beyond
those lists, such as tempo bands like 'Mid Tempo' and placements like 'TV Score'), and
three editorial judgements: energy (low | low-building | moderate | building | high),
resolves (whether it lands, or stays unresolved and tense) and vo_friendly (whether it
leaves space for a voiceover). versions counts the stems, alternate mixes and shorter cuts
that exist for the cue, and cutdown_lengths_s lists the cut lengths in seconds. ref is the
catalogue's ID for the cue. preview_url, when requested, is a temporary streaming link
that expires after 15 minutes; listen_url never expires.
A field absent from a row means the catalogue holds no data for it: an absent bpm means
untagged, not slow; an absent composer means no usable credit; an absent cutdown_lengths_s
means no timed cutdowns exist.
The player streams nearly every cue clean. A file downloaded from it without a licence is
a watermarked test file (a spoken "STYE Music" tag); a clean file comes with a licence.
preview_url is watermarked too.
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