Voices
Singers, characters, ensemble roles, languages, and performers.
Open specification · Draft 0.1
Open Lyric Alignment.
OLA is an open, target-neutral way to preserve lyrics, structure, timing, note anchors, corrections, and provenance—without making ordinary MIDI players understand any of it.
- Model
- Target-neutral lyric alignment
- MIDI
- Lossless JSON in
FF 7F - Fallback
- Standard lyrics in
FF 05 - Payload
- Strict UTF-8 · up to 4 MiB
- Status
- Publishable draft · version 0.1
- License
- CC BY 4.0 · schema and fixtures CC0
The missing layer
A lyric event tells you when. OLA preserves what it means.
Standard MIDI Lyric events are excellent compatibility data: text appears at a tick. They do not describe multiple singers, translations, exact line boundaries, cue ranges, confidence, manual constraints, or whether a syllable is anchored to a particular note.
OLA adds those semantics as a separate document. The same lyric structure can be aligned independently to a MIDI score, an audio recording, or another future target. MIDI is one binding, not the definition of the model.
One ordinary .mid file
Open Lyric Alignment track
FF 7F lossless OLA JSON chunks
FF 05 primary lyric projection
Ordinary MIDI software
Reads useful lyrics.
It ignores the sequencer-specific OLA payload and displays the standard FF 05 stream.
OLA-aware software
Reads the full document.
It validates the payload and bindings, then gains Unicode, lanes, ranges, anchors, provenance, and edit detection.
Core model
Structure first. Timing second.
Text remains independent of any one timeline. An alignment set places one lane against one target, so the same words can carry distinct score and recording alignments.
Lanes
Ordered lyric streams such as lead, duet, translation, or phonetic text.
Lines & cues
Exact text and structure at the author’s chosen granularity—line, phrase, word, syllable, breath, or another fragment.
Targets
MIDI, recordings, or future media with explicit time units and binding evidence.
Placements
Resolved ranges, confidence, review state, shared note links, and advisory or hard anchors.
Mappings
Relationships between timelines, explicit line boundaries, provenance, and namespaced extensions.
Conformance
Four claims, kept separate.
An implementation may support any subset. It should claim only the layers it actually satisfies.
- 01OLA Core 0.1
The document satisfies the target-neutral semantic model.
- 02OLA JSON 0.1
The model uses the strict UTF-8 JSON representation and validation rules.
- 03OLA-SMF 0.1
The complete document is embedded in MIDI with a primary standard-lyric projection.
- 04OLA RP-017 Portable 0.1
The projection satisfies strict portable ASCII syllable conventions.
Designed for edits
Failure stays visible and recoverable.
OLA stores separate fingerprints for note topology, the tempo map, and the generated lyric projection. A reader can tell a tempo edit from moved notes or an external lyric edit instead of treating every mismatch as generic corruption.
- Corrupt or unsupported payloadIgnore OLA authority and use standard lyrics.
- Changed lyric projectionPreserve both versions and require reconciliation before overwrite.
- Changed notesMark note links stale; retain resolved ranges and rebind conservatively.
- Changed tempoKeep tick placements; recompute real-time views and mappings.
Specification set
Normative documents and reference material.
This site is the approachable entry point. The source-form Markdown published alongside it carries the full normative wording for conformance.
OverviewArchitecture and compatibility strategy
Core 0.1Voices, lanes, placements, anchors, and provenance
JSON 0.1Codec shape, integer forms, extensions, and limits
SMF 0.1Chunk envelope, hashes, tracks, and fallback behavior
RP-017 profilePortable syllabic projection and coarse fallback
Schema & fixturesMachine-readable validation and original examples
Implement OLA-SMF
Start with the reader and writer contract.
The implementation guide turns the normative requirements into ordered read and write procedures, an exact header map, CLI commands, C# examples, and a safe fallback checklist.