ORDER IN THE CYPHER  //  JUDGE CLAUDE DEGAGNE PRESIDING  //  SPIT · DROP · CROWN  //  RAP BATTLES + MONTHLY CHARTS  //  STEP IN THE ARENA  //  YOUNG TONGUES //ORDER IN THE CYPHER  //  JUDGE CLAUDE DEGAGNE PRESIDING  //  SPIT · DROP · CROWN  //  RAP BATTLES + MONTHLY CHARTS  //  STEP IN THE ARENA  //  YOUNG TONGUES //
YOUNG TONGUESRIPPEN RAP BATTLES · AI SONG CHARTS
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OUR STORY

FOR THE KID WHO WRITES BARS IN A NOTEBOOK
BUT FREEZES IN FRONT OF A CROWD.

THE FOUNDER

Young Tongues was built by Paul DeGagné — a farmer in Alberta, Canada. Not a Silicon Valley engineer. Not a music producer. A farmer with a traumatic brain injury (irreparable left frontal-temporal lobe damage from a car accident), short-term memory loss, and a heart that has to be careful about adrenaline dumps.

Before this platform, Paul was computer-illiterate. He learned to code after being scammed out of roughly $400,000 of his kids' college fund by an online trading scheme. He decided that the way through was to build — not to hire, not to wait, not to complain. To build the tools himself.

THE PLATFORM

Young Tongues is two things under one roof: a live AI rap battle arena where writers face off 1-on-1, and a monthly community-crowned song chart where songwriters drop full tracks and let the community vote. Two crowns. One profile. Two ways to win.

The rule is writer-first: no auto-generated lyrics, no bot swarms, no loop scams. The AI handles the beat, the voice, and the judge. The human handles the words. That's the whole promise.

THE BUILD PARTNER

Young Tongues was built in partnership with Emergent — an AI-native coding platform that let a farmer with no traditional engineering background ship a real full-stack music tech application. Every line of this codebase was written in collaboration with Emergent's AI builders.

Paul is grateful to the Emergent team for the platform, for the Fabrizio Romano × Emergent Builders Contest that gave this project its first real spotlight, and for the belief that a solo builder with a story and an idea deserves a shot.

THE AI PARTNERS

The platform is powered by a stack of best-in-class models:

  • ◆ Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Anthropic) — rap verse generation, lyric auto-arrangement, and Judge DeGagné scoring
  • ◆ Suno V5 — full-song vocal + instrumental generation for The Charts
  • ◆ Nano Banana (Gemini) — character portrait and arena artwork generation
  • ◆ OpenAI TTS + Whisper — Judge DeGagné's voice and voice-typed verses
  • ◆ Runway Gen-4 Turbo — character motion loops on the battle stage
THE MISSION

Every kid who ever wrote lyrics in a notebook and got told "you'll never make it" — this is for them. Every writer who freezes in a crowd but crushes it on the page — this is for them. Every farmer, factory worker, night-shift nurse, or single parent who has a verse in them and no way to get it out — this is for them.

Come pick a fight. Come drop a track. The crown is up for grabs.

▶ ENTER THE ARENA▶ THE CHARTS