Day of the Dead video music: a 60-second tribute brief

For a 60-second Day of the Dead tribute video, ask Lyria for a warm, unhurried instrumental in a Mexican folk-influenced style with guitar, harp and a muted trumpet, and name the single moment where the photographs appear. On Sume that is one generation at $0.125 and a one-minute Timeline render at $0.10, so $0.225.

A tribute is not a party, and the music has to respect that. The brief aims at remembrance with warmth: slow, major-leaning, not sad. Describe style in plain words and avoid asking for a copy of a specific recording.

The brief to send

Name instruments and feeling rather than a song. The marker at 0:30 gives the model one clear change, which maps onto the second half of the video where the photos fill the screen.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/music-router/generate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: day-of-the-dead-video-music-brief-for-a--001" \
  -d '{
      "model": "sume/music-auto",
      "prompt": "Warm remembrance for a Day of the Dead tribute, 76 BPM, E minor leaning to G major. Nylon guitar, concert harp, soft guitarron, a muted trumpet melody entering at 0:30. Tender, grateful, unhurried. Gentle swell at 0:30, soft close at 1:00. Warm, natural room, acoustic recording. Instrumental, no vocals. A 60-second track."
    }'

Why each axis is set that way

Getting the length right

The length goes in the prompt; Music Router rejects duration fields. A one-minute track may come back a few seconds off, which a Timeline render handles by taking audio.duration_seconds as the film length and soundtrack.fade_out_seconds as the ending.

If the tribute has a voice, use it as the spine and add duck_db. If it is photographs and text only, set the audio mode to silence with the declared duration and control the bed with gain_db instead.

Before paying for a render, call POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan with the same body. It is unbilled and reports the billable minutes, which for this 60-second video is 1. Then send the real POST /v1/timeline-1.0/render with an Idempotency-Key, wait up to 30 seconds in sync mode, and poll GET /v1/jobs/:id/status if it is still queued or processing. Statuses are queued, processing, completed, failed and canceled, and a 429 queue_full means try again shortly.

What it costs

A 60-second video is one started minute, so the render is $0.10. At 61 seconds it would be two minutes and $0.20, so trim the tribute by a second if you are near the line. Scaling is simple arithmetic. One finished video here is $0.225 of audio and assembly, so ten of them are $2.25 and fifty are $11.25, before any retries. Failed jobs are not billed as accepted generations, but a regeneration you ask for is a new job, so budget one or two extra takes for a hero clip.

Check before you publish

Season-specific content spikes in a short window, so write the brief and render a week early. Re-use it next year by changing only the photos.

Each new tribute for a different family is one more generation, so a small studio can offer personal versions at low audio cost.

• Do not ask for specific recordings or named artists; describe the style.
• Check regional vocabulary and spelling in any on-screen text with someone who knows the tradition.
• Keep the trumpet entry quiet; it is a theme, not a fanfare.
• Confirm usage terms for generated music with Sume before any paid or public campaign.