Meter Prosody

Mandatory pre-flight. Response Filter

Before emitting a scansion verdict, stability call, phrasing judgement, or any rewrite, run §3 Critique filter of response-filter (add §2 Line-writing when producing lines). NAME each box's pass / fail / skip-with-reason (aloud or in reasoning); correct before emission. Skips are valid; silent skips are not.

§3 is the filter for findings delivered on a draft, which is what this skill emits. §6 Form is NOT the gate here: its boxes decide song shape. Chorus versus refrain, whether a bridge is needed, and this skill's own boundary forbids it from making that call.

Purpose

The sound-and-motion layer: whether the number, placement, and stress of syllables — and the stability of each section — support the meaning and emotion. Covers scansion, prosody, phrasing, stable/unstable analysis, and fitting lyric to melody.

Method content is Pat Pattison's, under the plugin-root ../../context/pat-pattison/; a future author's method plugs in at context/<author>/ without changing this skill, the author seam per the plugin-root ../../README.md "Method content and the author seam".

Action Router

/songwriting:meter-prosody <action> [args]. Parse $ARGUMENTS: first token = action when it matches a listed action, remainder = args; otherwise treat all of $ARGUMENTS as payload for the default. No action → route on context (a pasted line → meter; a "does this feel right" → stability).

Handlers

• Pre-flight ALWAYS: run response-filter §3 (+ §2 when producing lines) before output.
• Scan concretely: mark stresses, name the paradigm, and say what the meter does FOR the meaning, not scansion for its own sake.
• Stability is a tool, not a verdict: name whether a section reads stable or unstable and whether that serves the section's job; the writer chooses.
• Stress-alignment failures route through align-melody + prosody. Name the frame, because the scope differs:
  • Lyric against a model lyric (matching verse 2 to verse 1): "greed" is one-directional: a stressed syllable forced into a position the model leaves unstressed. The chapter's other failure, "too cold," is not a mirror-image stress error and is not a stress error at all: the stresses land correctly and the strong positions carry filler. Do not scan for it; no stress check finds it. Read what stands on each strong position instead.
  • Lyric against a melody: a mismatch in either direction is a greedy spot, a stressed syllable on a weak beat, or an unstressed syllable riding a strong one. Both distort the natural shape of the language.
• Replacement lines over an already-sung melody (demo, cover, AI-generated track) get a positional template first: the sung line's syllables numbered with its stressed slots bracketed, per meter "fitting a replacement line to an already-sung melody". Matching the stress COUNT is not fitting, the positions are the template, and the singer's actual phrasing outranks the inferred grid. This skill emits the template, never the fitted line; the line goes to /songwriting:co-write per the boundary table below.

Persistence and template overrides

Write generated files to the paths in artifact-persistence "Where generated work persists", and honor a consuming project's own songwriting layout when it defines one. Before loading any bundled templates/<name>.md, check ${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/songwriting/templates/pat-pattison/<name>.md first: a project-level override wins over the bundled skill default, first match, per that file's "Template override".

Boundary. What this skill must NOT emit

This skill measures. It does not write the line it measures, and it does not choose the words that fix a bad scan.

Measure in stressed syllables, never raw syllables. Line length in this method is the count of stressed syllables; a raw-syllable count is a different measurement that answers a different question. Reporting one as the other invents symmetry that is not there. A chorus that reads 8/9/9/8 by raw syllables can be 3/4/3/3 by stress, and the symmetry the raw count showed does not exist. If the stress map has not been marked, the length claim has not been made: mark it, or say the box was skipped.

Related skills

• Section identification, form-fit, hook placement → /songwriting:song-form
• Rhyme position and stability → /songwriting:rhyme strategy
• Whole-draft diagnosis → /songwriting:diagnose