Sing in a foreign language with perfect pronunciation

You don't know how to read French, Japanese or Ukrainian? You want to sing in these languages anyway because you love the sound? Welcome to ipipapa!

We supplement original sheet music with a universally readable phonetic transcription. We offer audio material and further assistance to help you sing in any language you want, with ease. Whether it's Ukrainian Folk songs, French chansons, classical songs in Mandarin or Italian operas – with the help of our international and transdisciplinary team, you will soon be singing with the same confidence you have in your native language.

What does sheet music with phonetic transcriptions look like?

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Sheet Music & IPA?

Sing in any language you want? It's possible with the automated phonetic transcription of lyrics, directly in sheet music.

Phonetic transcriptions in sheet music – Why?

As passionate singers, we have noticed that many pieces of music only have the original lyrics or a transliteration that is difficult to read for non-native speakers as well as often times inaccurate. The solution for this problem is the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. It is a phonetic transcription that most people perceive subconsciously in foreign language classes at school, and with the help of which all the sounds of the world can be represented. The best thing is: we can easily learn this alphabet. In doing so, we draw from the same pool of phonetic signs for each language again and again.

Our service is that we offer IPA directly in the musical notes as well as other aids such as audio files. Hours of rehearsal of lyrics and unclear guidelines for foreign language songs are finally in the past. Now you can concentrate on what's important – the music.


It surely takes forever...?

No! We offer you musical notation with phonetic literations, which we can create in high quality within record time.

For the implementation, we use a special newly developed computer program and we are working on program variants for different languages and dialects. We use an automated method in which the phonetic transcription is placed directly into the musical notes. Ipipapa is the first to use this automated method. With a transcription time of a few minutes per note page, this method is many times faster than manual transcription.

Our program learns with every transcription and thus becomes better and better. Nevertheless, a check by our experts is not omitted, since song texts can be very complex and often need to be checked due to their time of origin or linguistic peculiarities (e.g. dialects). Thus, we make sure that the transcription is as close as absolutely possible to the intended pronunciation.

For the further development of our program, we cooperate with the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and experts in phonetics and sung language worldwide.

If you want to see what the final product looks like, take a look at our shop. There you will also find sample pages and our free online appendix for each edition published.

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Services

Whether you are a singer, choir director, publisher or interested in optimizing processes

For Singers

Personal support and singing workshops for you and your choir. With our worldwide network of language specialists* we support you in the realization of your musical work in a language of your choice.

Contact us here for your personal offer!


For Choirs and the Book Trade

We want to break new ground in music publishing. Qith our automated approach we prepare sheet music in a variety of languages for all singers.

If you would like to purchase a higher number of our sheet music, please contact us here.


You can identify with our mission of singing without borders? Want to support us or work with us as a publisher or as part of our team? Feel free to contact us!

For Companies that Want to Optimize their Processes

Through automation, we can now deliver song texts in an indefinite number of languages to a high quality – in a matter of minutes. In doing so, we are constantly adapting to the most diverse challenges in the fields of technology, communication, linguistics and music. Adaptability, combined with our ambition to simplify labor-intensive processes, is not only a necessity for us, but also our passion. The goal is to reduce complexity to a minimum and bring order into existing data structures.

Do you need help with the implementation of your company's internal processes and would like to work with a creative and tech-savvy team? Our focus is on the structuring of databases, data structures, analyses and (visual) preparation of data sets as well as the development of workflows. Contact us here for more information.

Sheet music with phonetic transcription for listening

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