See which sounds your verse is actually made of — and what that means for how it will land.
Writers talk about a song sounding dark or bright or hard, and then argue about it, because nobody can see the evidence. This tool makes the evidence visible. It splits every word into vowel groups and consonant runs, colour-codes them, and counts them — so the claim “this verse is percussive” becomes “this verse is 41% short front vowels and 38% plosives”.
Build it and the sound map shows up here.
Why the sound of a verse is not a matter of opinion
Vowels carry pitch and duration; consonants carry attack and texture. A verse built from short front vowels and plosives — “bit”, “back”, “cut”, “stop” — physically cannot sustain, so it lands as clipped and percussive no matter what the words mean. Swap in open back vowels and liquids — “low”, “calm”, “roll” — and the same melody becomes warm and legato. The meaning has not changed; the mouth has.
This is why a lyric that reads well can sound wrong against a particular arrangement. If the track is built on sustained pads and your verse is 60% plosive, the two are fighting, and no amount of rewriting the words will fix it — you have to change the vowels.
How to use the result
- Look at the dominant vowel family first. If it is short and closed but the melody wants long notes, swap the rhyme words for open vowels before you touch anything else.
- Assonance runs of three or more are usually deliberate and usually good. Runs you did not intend are the ones to break up, because the ear hears a pattern and looks for a reason.
- Alliteration across three consecutive words reads as a device. Across two it reads as accident. If you want it, make it three; if you do not, break the third word.
- Compare two verses side by side. If verse one and verse two have near-identical sound profiles, the second verse will feel like a repeat even when the words are entirely different.
Questions people ask
- Is this a real phonetics analysis?
No. It groups letters, not phonemes. “ough” is counted as one vowel group even though it makes four different sounds across “though”, “through”, “rough” and “cough”. It is a way to see patterns you would otherwise miss, not a linguistic instrument.
- Why are some consonants not coloured?
Every consonant run gets a tint by class — plosive, fricative, nasal, liquid or glide. The tints are deliberately subtle so the vowels stay readable. The counts below the map are the precise version.
- What counts as a run?
Three or more consecutive words sharing a vowel sound for assonance, or sharing an initial consonant sound for alliteration. Consecutive means next to each other in the text, ignoring punctuation.
- Can I use this for a whole song?
Paste anything you like, but the map gets hard to read past about forty lines. Run it per verse and compare the numbers instead.
What this tool does not do. It counts letters, and English spelling does not map cleanly to sound, so every count here is an approximation. It cannot hear your song, and the “read” it gives at the top is a pattern description, not a judgement — a clipped verse is exactly right for some songs. Nothing is uploaded; everything runs in your browser and works offline. See the site disclaimer. Written by Nico, who builds these tools and writes about writing at WrittenTone.