length: 90 seconds, ±10s
structure: hook (4 bars) → verse (16 bars) → hook → verse (16 bars) → hook → outro
tempo: ~140 BPM, 4/4
bed: trap — 808 sub, triplet hats, sparse snare on 3, room for the vocal
vocal: rapped, not sung. emo-rap honesty (see ../VOICE.md)
output: single mp3 per track in out/<slug>.mp3. no video.

source → track #

each track corresponds to one paper or one vision from the platter. the lyric is the compression of that paper into the form a song can carry. the hook is the vision in one line.

papers/arxiv-<slug>/<slug>.tex
  → pop/big-pictures/<slug>.txt           (plain lyrics)
  → pop/big-pictures/<slug>.np            (notepat score: NOTE:syllable per syllable)
  → pop/big-pictures/out/<slug>.mp3       (mix)

the .np (notepat) file is the score in the same notation as the folk-songs paper (papers/arxiv-folk-songs/folk-songs.tex §3). every syllable carries a pitch — making the lyric playable on notepat in song mode and renderable through recap/bin/vocal.mjs (formant synth) or any other pitch-driven voice. the file is its own URL when fed to notepat.com?song=....

lyric file format #

plain text. no metadata header. blocks separated by blank lines, labeled in lowercase:

hook
<4 lines>

verse 1
<16 lines>

hook

verse 2
<16 lines>

hook

outro
<2-4 lines>

pipeline (planned) #

recap/bin/big-pictures.mjs — mirrors the recap cli pattern. cached per step so reruns cost nothing.

read paper
  → draft lyrics (jeffrey-pvc voice + emo-rap overlay)
    → write notepat score (.np)            — every syllable carries pitch (visual / kidlisp future)
      → AC-native trap bed (recap/bin/trap.mjs)
        → vocal stem: /api/say with jeffrey-pvc (provider:"jeffrey", voice:"neutral:0")
          → WhisperX forced alignment      — per-word timestamps
            → snap drift to bar grid       — ±200ms tolerance, 16th-note quantization
              → vocal-post per-word edits  — pitch / elongate / effect / harmonize, aggression-tunable
                → mix (bed + vocal)
                  → mp3

vocal source #

big-pictures uses jeffrey-pvc via ElevenLabs (the same voice the 24h recap pipeline already uses). hooks and verses both. it's literally jeffrey's cloned voice and is already wired up through /api/say.

an AC-native formant-synth vocal was attempted and dropped on 2026-05-03 — it produced melodic tones but not voice; getting real vocoder/talkbox character would need glottal pulse + F4/F5 + pitch jitter + consonants, a full research lane. recap/bin/vocal.mjs remains in the repo as experimental research; may resurface as a melodic instrument layer (formant-shaped lead in the bed) rather than a vocal.

bottom-up posture preserved at the composition layer. the bed is composed bar-by-bar from AC instruments (trap.mjs over percussion.mjs); the score is hand-written in .np notation. ElevenLabs is the performance on top of that composition.

tracks #

none yet. first candidate: plork (laptop orchestras, planetary scale).