Yes, you can give someone a happy birthday song with their name in it. For common names, ready-made videos exist. For a song that is really about them, XNeuronal composes one of about a minute and a half, from what you have told it, in the style you pick. You can read the lyrics before they are sung.

What everyone is looking for: their name in the song

Every month, thousands of people type the same request: a happy birthday song with a name. It makes sense. The birthday song sung around a cake lands differently when the name falls in the right place, and a voice message or a video sent in the morning means more than a text.

There are three ways to get there, and each has its limit.

Ready-made videos. You can find them for most common names: the familiar tune, the name dropped in, sometimes an animation. They are instant. But it is the same video for every Emma, and a rarer name, or one spelled differently, is often missing.

Personalised song websites. They offer a fuller song, with a name picked from a list and sometimes a few details. But the song stays a template where you fill in the blanks.

Writing it yourself. It is the most touching version, and it is easier than it looks.

Writing a verse that rings true

You don't need to be a songwriter. Three things are enough to make a song that could only be about one person.

  • A shared memory, a precise one. Not "all our good times", but "the car breaking down on the way back from Cornwall". A detail only the people close to them will recognise.
  • A habit or a taste. The coffee with far too much sugar, the odd socks, the passion for strawberry cake. That is what makes people smile.
  • One simple wish for the year. A sentence, not a speech.

For the chorus, put the name on a strong beat, at the end of a line, and repeat it. A four-line chorus that comes back twice beats six verses. If you sing to a well-known tune, count the syllables of the melody and cut your lines to the same length: that is the whole secret of good wedding songs.

The real difficulty isn't the writing. It is remembering, on the day, what the person loves and what you have lived through together this year.

What XNeuronal does

XNeuronal is an app that remembers what you tell it. Conversation after conversation, it keeps the small things you mention about people: Jack has taken up the guitar, Emma swears by strawberry cake, that rainy weekend in Brighton. That is exactly the material a birthday song is made of.

You just ask: "Make a song for Emma's birthday, reggae if possible." The assistant asks two or three questions when something is missing, the occasion, the style, a message you want to slip in, then it writes the lyrics from what it knows about her.

A few choices guide that writing:

  • You can read the lyrics before the music. If a line doesn't feel right, you say so and it rewrites it. The song is only generated once the lyrics are approved.
  • Only what she would be happy to hear in front of her friends. That is the rule the writing follows: nothing made up, nothing awkward. An argument told one evening has no place in a birthday song, and it doesn't go in.
  • Your message, word for word. If there is a sentence you care about, it is taken almost as is into the bridge of the song.
  • A style, not a copy. You can ask for "old school rap", "a gentle piano ballad", or "in the style of" your favourite singer: the song takes the genre and the mood, without ever naming them.
  • Sung in your language. English, French, German, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese: the voice sings the language the lyrics are written in.

The song lasts about a minute and a half and usually arrives in under a minute. It is kept with its lyrics, on a card you can find again just by asking. The music engine sometimes refuses to sing a particular name: the song is then rewritten without it rather than not existing at all, and you are told.

And if the person has the app too, you can send it to them: it goes out on its own as soon as it is ready.

Never miss the date again

A song is no use if you realise it was their birthday the day after. XNeuronal reminds you on the day, and it can also read the birthdays already saved in your phone's calendar. Under a birthday card, it gathers what you have said the person likes: enough to find a present, or the first verse.

That is the whole idea of a memory that remembers for you. You mention something in passing, one Thursday in March. It remembers in October, at the moment it matters, and this time, you can hear it.