Limelight

Song → map → show.

A song goes in. We listen once and write a map of it — where the beats are, where the chapters change, and the moments that matter.

We are building an understanding of music, not a light show. The map knows nothing about output. Anything that can read it can use it: lights in a club, cut points for a video editor, a note chart for a game, a pace curve for a workout, a colour per seating block for fifty thousand phones. Lighting is the first reader because photons are persuasive on a stage — it is the proving ground, not the point.

The demo is one moment: the room goes dark half a second before the drop, then detonates. No light that listens to a microphone can do that, because when a drop is coming the sound is getting louder. Choosing darkness requires knowing what happens next. We read the whole song in advance.

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Two interfaces. Nothing else crosses between us.

	what it is	who writes it	who reads it
the map — MAP.md	what the music does. universal. one per song	listen/	every reader
the frame — readers/lights/FRAME.md	what every light is doing at time t. the lighting reader's format, not a universal one	play/	readers/lights/, hardware

The map describes the song. The frame describes the room. One per song, versus forty per second. Other readers have their own output shapes and never touch the frame.

Five words and the set is closed — map · layout · wiring · recipe · frame. One line for the whole system, and what each word means: WORDS.md. Read it before you invent a sixth word.

If you ever need something else to pass between two people, say so out loud. That is a design bug, not a task.

Folders

folder	owner	one line
listen/	Amal	song → map
play/	Dheeraj	map + time → frame
readers/lights/	Nikitha	the club, in a browser
readers/chapters/	anyone, 20 lines	map in, chapter list out. proves "same file"
portal/	Muzammil	upload, view, fix a moment, preview
bench/	Sebastian	the tapping tool and the scoreboard
songs/	Renjith	truth — what a human says is actually there

Run it

make check     # is everything wired
make bench     # the scoreboard: maps vs truth
make lights    # open the club in a browser
make demo      # the whole chain, one song

Two rules that matter more than the rest

1. No audio in this repo, ever. Bring your own copies into songs/<name>/audio.* — it is gitignored. The product's own posture is scores, never songs; the repo practises it.
2. Changes to MAP.md or FRAME.md go through a pull request. They are the only things here that are expensive to get wrong. Everything else: push to main.

Plan and dates: PLAN.md. Lighting recipe: readers/lights/RECIPE.md. GPUs: listen/GPU.md.