Making a Child Smile, One Song at a Time
About a year ago, I saw where Suno and the Songs of Love Foundation were having what was basically an audition/contest to become a contributor to the foundation. I applied and was sent a test case to create a song for, so I did. I finally got everything the way I wanted it and submitted. Lo and behold, they chose me as one of the people they invited to create songs for them. It has really been a rewarding experience, to say the least. So…when Frank, do what Frank do. I created a tool specifically designed to help me with creative ideas.
The Songs of Love Foundation is a nonprofit that creates personalized songs for children facing serious illness, crafted around a specific child’s name, interests, and personality, and delivered as a gift of joy during one of the hardest seasons of their life. When I came across their mission, I wanted to find a way to help.
This tool is my small contribution to that effort. It’s a web-based assistant that helps songwriters and volunteers draft personalized songs faster by putting AI to work on the creative heavy lifting. Fill in the details about a child, their name, age, hobbies, favorite things, and the assistant generates a song draft that follows the foundation’s official guidelines. The writer still shapes and refines the final piece, but the blank page problem is solved, and more children can get their songs sooner.
What Makes It Interesting
The core challenge here wasn’t building a chatbot, it was constraining one usefully. A general-purpose language model can write a song about anything in any style, but Songs of Love has a specific voice, structure, and tone they want to preserve. The interesting engineering work was in the prompt architecture: encoding the foundation’s guidelines in a way that consistently shapes the model’s output without making it feel robotic or template-stamped.
The app is built with HTML and TypeScript and powered by the Gemini API through Google AI Studio. Keeping the stack minimal was intentional. This is a tool that volunteers might self-host or hand off, so simplicity and portability matter more than a fancy framework.
How It Works
- A volunteer fills out a form with the child’s personal details, name, age, favorite things, personality traits
- The assistant sends those details to Gemini with a carefully structured system prompt that encodes Songs of Love’s songwriting guidelines
- A personalized song draft comes back, ready for the songwriter to review, tweak, and bring to life
- User uploads information to Suno to create the custom song for the child
- Upload the song to Songs Of Love Foundation for distribution to the child
Status & Source
This project is actively maintained. The source code is hosted on my self-hosted Forgejo instance at forgejo.familytechlab.com. If you’re a songwriter or volunteer affiliated with the Songs of Love Foundation and want to use or adapt this tool, feel free to reach out.
Sometimes the best reason to build something is simply that it might help someone. This one might help a lot of someones.
