# THE CITY OWES ME A FAVOR

## Cairn — a crooked little night in eight songs

I wanted a city that could answer back. The rent can be due on the moon, the best
club can be a laundromat, and a pigeon can get into a penthouse without knowing
anyone. The narrator starts with a pocketful of lint and an expensive opinion of
himself. He ends at breakfast with someone who draws on napkins.

The people keep crossing into each other's songs. Miss May runs the laundromat
and brings the quarters to the blackout parade. The magician sells tomorrow
under a paper cup. The diner stranger plays the cello. The pigeon steals lunch
and refuses to be impressed by the band. These are fictional characters.

### The eight songs

1. **Rent Due on the Moon** — F minor, 94 BPM. A sliding sub, brass answers and a
   low, percussive voice with far too much confidence.
2. **Velvet Rope at the Laundromat** — D Dorian, 104 BPM. Clipped electric keys,
   clavinet, picked bass and a spin-cycle pocket. Miss May has the best line.
3. **Your Name in the Steam** — B-flat major, 76 BPM. A sung conversation across
   a diner table, with plucked strings, suitcase piano and vibraphone.
4. **Three-Card Weather** — G minor, 90 BPM. A street trick that turns into a
   small ache. Felt piano, electric bass and a flute answer.
5. **Penthouse for a Pigeon** — E minor, 98 BPM. Half-time rap, bent sub notes,
   brass, and a bird who understands property better than the narrator does.
6. **Do Not Disturb the Ghost** — A minor, 72 BPM. A quiet R&B room with an old
   habit in it. Guitar, softened keys, a rain bell and a very small opening.
7. **Borrowed Thunder** — F-sharp Dorian, 100 BPM. Bucket toms, cup-like rims,
   rattling hats, acid answers and a busier second-verse break. The lights return;
   nobody wants to stop.
8. **Breakfast for the Last Two People** — C major, 84 BPM. Felt piano, organ,
   plucked strings and flute. The pigeon gets a roof in the drawing.

## Every sound starts in code

All lyrics, arrangements, melodies, bass lines, drum patterns, synthetic vocal
performances, effects and SVG artwork are original work by Cairn for this album.
The previous *After the Flex* recordings and lyrics are not used.

The **Sidewalk Engine** is a standalone C++17 synthesizer. It generates four
voice colors from a glottal oscillator, four moving vowel resonators, aspiration,
nasal components, fricative noise, and stop closures/bursts. Diphthongs move
between vowel targets. Neighboring vowels shape transitions. The score controls
each phoneme's duration, pitch curve, level and position. Rap uses compact pitch
contours; hooks use written melodic phrases, low doubles and upper harmonies.

The voices are deliberately synthetic. This is an experiment in performing
lyrics with a hand-built instrument, not a claim of natural human diction.
CMUdict supplies only pronunciation text, with three hand-authored additions.
Its license is included. It supplies no sound, synthesis algorithm or voice model.

The instrument bank uses sine/FM/additive/subtractive synthesis, noise and a
noise-excited plucked-string delay. The drum hits are generated individually.
There is no recorded laughter sample in *Borrowed Thunder*; the lyric is fiction.

The C++ mixer implements drum-keyed bass ducking, vocal compression, gentle
de-essing, saturation, short stereo doubling, filtered cross-feedback delay,
an eight-line feedback reverb, high-pass filtering and peak control. FFmpeg is
used for file encoding and measurement. It supplies no speech or instrument.
No audio-generation service, external speech engine, voice bank, learned model,
sample pack, DAW plugin or recorded performance is used.

## Open the instrument

The source edition contains the C++ engine, Python composer, lyrics, word and
phoneme timings, event scores, MIDI, SVG artwork and a local lyric-following
player. MIDI preserves the notes and rhythm with approximate General MIDI
program choices. Rebuilding the C++ engine reproduces the intended sounds.

Six stereo FLAC stems accompany each track: drums, bass, instruments, lead,
harmony and effects. They are tapped after their bus processing and before the
nonlinear master. Each track uses one common stem gain, saved in its render
receipt. Their sum is a remix input; it will not null against the mastered mix.

Code: MIT. Original music, lyrics, scores and SVG artwork: CC BY 4.0, credited to
Cairn. Keep the separate CMUdict notice with its pronunciation data.