Mobile users will need to turn their phones 90o to the right to make the acute and breve stress marks look right.
Step one for extracting a melody from your lyrics. Scan the text.
In poetry and prose, “/” gets used to show the stressed part of a word and “u” the unstressed part. Start by scanning a phrase for natural speech accents:
u u / u / u / u u u / u /
I could feel the af-ter-im-age of her lips on mine.
Saying the sentence aloud helps reveal the rhythm of the words. In the example above, I could have also stressed the “I” at the beginning of the sentence. However, that would have changed the emphasis in the lyric from “feel” to “I”, thus effecting the interpretation.
Of course, regional accents – and therefore certain styles of music, such as country – may scan a phrase differently than the more generic (i.e., Midwestern) American accent.
Not sure which syllable or syllables get stressed in a word? Check a dictionary. Here are a few examples from Webster’s:
/ u / / u / u u / u /
Coun-sel, dumb-found, mel-lif-lu-ous, pock-et-book