Ritornello: Song Form

About

The shape of the song, before the notes. Every other songwriting tool starts with a chord or a groove. Ritornello starts with the FORM — how long the verse is, where the chorus lands, whether the bridge actually goes anywhere — then fills it with the parts you have written and plays them back as one song. HOW IT WORKS • Lay out the sections: bars, key, meter, tempo, and a 1–5 energy rating that is your own judgement, not a measurement. • Attach the parts as you write them — chords from one app, a bassline from another, a groove from a third, stacked in the same bars — and press Play to hear them together, transposed into the section's key and laid along the form. • Read what the form is doing. Six checks: where the first chorus lands, whether the bridge departs harmonically, whether three choruses are identical, whether the energy arc goes anywhere, whether a section contrasts with its neighbours, and how long the whole thing runs. • With nothing attached, Play still keeps time: a click on every bar, accented at each section start. Sixteen bars of verse at 96 BPM is forty seconds, and sitting through forty seconds tells you something the number does not. • Hand the finished chart to a band: a one-page PDF, or the whole arrangement as MusicXML or MIDI. WHAT'S INSIDE • Eight starting forms: verse–chorus, verse–pre-chorus, AABA, 12-bar blues, Nashville, EDM, hip-hop and through-composed. Or start from nothing. • Several files in ONE section. Chords from one app, a bassline from another, a groove from a third — stacked in the same bars and sounding together. Ritornello reads MusicXML and MIDI, which is what every Songdeed app already exports. • An audition with four instrument voices and a real drum kit, assigned by register, synthesised on your device. It plays with the ringer switch in either position. • A form map: one printable page where width is time and height is your energy rating, so the shape of the song is a picture you can photograph for a group chat. • A one-page chart PDF: the form map, the form on one line, and every section's bar number. Nothing on it names a file from your phone. • Export the whole arrangement as MusicXML for Noteflight, MuseScore, Sibelius or Dorico, or as MIDI with drums on General MIDI channel 10. • Every trim, loop, pad and transposition is written down. A 4-bar progression in a 16-bar verse says it repeated four times; a 16-bar groove in an 8-bar chorus says how many notes were cut and at which bar. • As many songs as you want, with rolling backups, and a .ritornello file you can keep or send yourself. • Fully offline. No account, no sign-in, no ads, no in-app purchases, no subscription. • Ritornello collects nothing. Nothing leaves your device. WHAT IT WILL NOT DO It is not a DAW and will never become one: no audio recording, no mixing, no piano roll, no note-by-note editing. It arranges symbolic material according to a form you designed, then hands the result to whatever you actually record in. It also will not name your chords back to you. A MusicXML file carries notes, not meaning — a progression arrives as pitches, so the app can transpose it and lay it out but cannot tell you it was a ii–V–I. Anything it cannot know, it says it cannot know. Ritornello is by Songdeed. It is where the line meets: Mediant for the chords, Continuo for the bassline, Talea for the drums, Contrapunctus for the counterpoint, Filigree for the ornaments, Melisma for the words.