Back to work A high-school side project

Lyrics by Text

No data plan. A flip phone. A little PHP.

PHPLinuxEmailSMS / MMS
AI-generated visualization. A 16-second AI reconstruction of my bus-ride workaround, made with Higgsfield and composited phone text. Silent, with original demonstration lyrics.

The camera moves over my shoulder down to my RAZR, with a Zune on my lap, then stays on the phone. I type streetlights count the miles to lyrics@nessdan.net and send it. Half a second after Sent appears, an MMS arrives with the complete twelve-line demo song Window Seat, scrolling through three verses.

The round trip

A few words out. A whole song back.
  1. 01

    A few words from the bus

    I texted the words I could remember to lyrics@nessdan.net from my RAZR.

  2. 02

    An inbox at home

    My headless Linux server received the message. A PHP script watched the mailbox and parsed the body.

  3. 03

    A search and a little scraping

    The script added “lyrics” to those words, searched Google, and extracted the song's lyrics from a result page.

  4. 04

    The whole song, by MMS

    The server sent the text back as a big MMS message. I could read along while my Zune kept playing.

I had the music. I wanted the words.

Back in high school, before smartphones were everywhere, I rode the bus with a first-generation Zune and a RAZR flip phone. I wanted to read the lyrics to whatever I was listening to, but I didn’t have internet access or want to use mobile data.

So I made a way to ask my computer at home instead.

The address was the interface

I had a headless Linux server, a mail server, and a PHP script watching an inbox. From my phone, I’d send a text message to lyrics@nessdan.net with a few words from the song.

When that message arrived, the script parsed the body, added “lyrics” to the words I’d sent, and made a Google search. It grabbed the lyrics from a page in the results and sent them back to me as a big MMS message.

That was the whole interaction: a few words out, a whole song back. No website to open on the phone. No app to install. Just the messaging screen I already had.

Me in high school, with the dark tousled hair and blue polo from that era

Built for the bus ride

The point wasn’t to build a lyrics service for everyone. I wanted to sit on the bus, listen to my music, and read along. The phone couldn’t do everything I wanted, but it could send a message—and that was enough to reach a computer that could.

My white first-generation Zune in its case, with the headphone cable plugged in

This is a personal project from that period, retold from memory. The photos are mine; the diagrams explain the idea rather than reproduce surviving server logs or source code.