Third verse of Swan Song

Whether this is my final project or not is moot. There’s a long story behind this effort. What I am doing is getting a usable copy of my data out to the public where all the work is independent of my unique and now obsolescent database and its various interfaces. All that is required to critique or even recreate my work is the 18 volumes of the e-books, and the music and batch files if you wanted to make changes or reproduce the music in a different form.

Only a few people are really interested at this time. But suppose you were regularly involved with chanting the Tanach, here it all is in principle in a form that is easy to learn from. I can imagine this being used in the yearly cycle of Torah, Haftarah, and feast day recitations.

Or suppose you really decided that learning the Hebrew Bible was important to you. Here is the data in a transparent form complete with tone of voice.

(That doesn't mean that you would easily understand it-- in fact understanding is not the point, it's love that is the point -- and who can possibly understand that!)

Also easily duplicatable are my programs and functions to create the Music XML from a Unicode base. The programmers at mgketer.org could do this easily if they chose. They have a better starting point with their database than I had when I wrote the program a baker's dozen or so years ago.

So my data and methods can dissolve into the ether with me, but my presentation of the text is unique at present and can continue within the bounds of the technology that carries it. All you need is an e-book reader. Anyone can read it on a phone or computer that has the right software. And maybe it will see a print version some day. 

But suppose that you wanted to have control over the content of the e-book. I recommend Calibre, and a music program -- I use Musescore (4.5.1 at present). You don't need either of these to read the text and music, only if you want to modify the text or music. If you are going to build the text again based on your modifications, you may also need the batch files that take the single line pages and convert them to verses that fit into the e-book. That's much easier than putting it all in a database.

Status today is 63% of chapters done, slightly over 55% of verses.

Complete books: 

Job - available for review or pre-review purchase here.

Psalms, the Five Scrolls, - ready for production process,

Proverbs, Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, The Twelve, - Music complete, awaiting short summary of the music of the volume, then to production process,

Leviticus, half-way through the music, estimated completion in a few days. 

The remaining 8 volumes are in a stub form, i.e. the e-book framework is ready for the first chapter. There are about 75 days remaining for me to work at 5 chapters a day - roughly 20 minutes per chapter - reviewing the verses that have internal returns to the tonic, running the html and music programs, sculpting the music, and loading it into the e-book. I hope I have time to finish. Then I would like to read and chant the entire Bible, but I don't think I have time to do that so I will have to run some routines to see if there are significant differences that can be pointed out in a short intro to each volume. The full introductory paragraphs are only in the Job volume. 

Anyone who has followed my work probably needs little introduction to the presentation.

The Music of the Bible -- The Book of Job

The First volume in the series, The Music of the Bible, is now available for purchase. You can find it here.

Please let your friends know and be the first to review it. Such a presentation of the Hebrew Bible has not been seen before.

Biblical Studies Carnival

Jim West has hosted a unique carnival -- as he does always -- here. 

Second verse of Swan Song

 February 4, I reported that I was 22% along the way to presenting the music of the bible in SVG images verse by verse in epub format. 

I measured where I am as of March 22.

The first volume is being edited by my publisher. So this will see the light of availability - perhaps by Canada Day. Not to rush too much the thoughts that happen when you are doing a project like this. As you can see from the table below, I have completed 7 volumes of a planned 18. These are the 438 chapters of Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, The Twelve, Psalms, Job, and the Five Scrolls. That's 47% of the chapters but only 38% of the verses -- so a lot of removal of spurious silluqs and sculpting of the music is left to do. Probably some tasks could be done by an agent or script in a musescore addon-- but it might take longer to write and use than 488 right clicks over the next few months! 

I'm still astonished at the number of spurious silluq accents, 1 verse in every three this morning has one or more errors in the Leningrad codex. The resulting tonic monotone shows that no one understood what they were doing to the music. It's not that there aren't, sometimes, dips to the tonic in the musical line. It's a long recitation on the tonic that should be rare. 

It's curious too that these extra accents result in more than one per lexical word. This too happens in the music. This shows, as I have noted elsewhere, that accents aren't just for an 'accented' syllable. They are melody, and in some ways, though limited in this music, an accent can occur anywhere. It's quite possible, and often happens, that a syllable marked with an 'accent' is lyrically an upbeat.

Relevant for today

 Please watch this lecture by Philippe Sands

Biblical Studies carnival 225

Phillip Long has posted the carnival #225 at Reading Acts. He mentions my project to produce the music line by line. Last month it was at 22%. Today it is at 35%. I hope to have finished Isaiah by the time you read this. More to come as it progresses. Not much blogging though. Too busy.

A process for maintenance of the music once it is extracted from the database

At some point I hope to have EPUB's for every chapter of the Bible, one verse at a time with the music. I designed what is likely to be my final product to help people learn the music of the Hebrew Bible. 

Here is a quick look at Isaiah 40 verse 1.

The music embedded in the text of Isaiah 40, verse 1

And here's the text:

Isaiah 40: (Verses 1 to 1) Syllables: 14; Longest recitation: 4; Tenor: g 42.86%;
Ornament density: 0%; Average phrase length: 7.

1 Comfort, comfort, my people, says your God. (1-4-1)
א נחמ֥ו נחמ֖ו עמ֑י יאמ֖ר אלהיכֽם	8 6		a nkmu nkmu ymi iamr alohicm

Notice how the music moves based on the accents under the text. Count them (5) and observe the five movements from the starting note to the mid point and back.

Everything is in the database. I am just beginning to work on this chapter and it fits my purpose in this blog post. It took a few short minutes for me to produce that music and text directly from the database. I didn't type or scribe any of it. I had to use a png image instead of svg on this platform since blogger doesn't (yet) support svg. 

We wrote data-driven programs. If the data was well-designed, it was easy to get the required output from it.

Over the last few months, I have been getting the data out of the database and into epubs where normal people could maintain it if necessary. It is becoming simpler.

For those sections that I have finished, the music and the data surrounding it can be maintained by anyone who can use Musescore and Calibre. No other dependencies needed - except to be able to rename files. No database knowledge required.

Finally I figured out a way to generate the html and .bat files so that they have the best chance of corresponding to individual lines of music. Roughly 30 or 31 syllables will fit on a page width depending on the ornament density of the verse. Most verses fit within three lines of music on an iPhone, making it possible to have the Bible in Hebrew and English with its embedded music in your pocket.

Music Files

I will deliver all the necessary music files and verified batch rename files to my publisher if we have success, so that if people wanted, for instance, the base music for a chapter, it would be available in an mscz (music zip) file. Load the mscz file, change the page length to the length you want, remove the line feeds as desired, and you have the full score for a chapter. Arrange and perform as you wish. The music itself is not copyright. It is part of the Bible and derived by a key that is discoverable from the way the te'amim are used in the Hebrew text.

Possibly some day, Calibre or some other program or avatar will be able to sing the music for the reader, but that was not possible the last time I checked. And I won't be checking any time soon if I am going to get all the data out and ready for study. I'm sorry that more people don't follow Wm Byrd's injunction to learn to sing. And by the way, learn to read music also.

I have given away the music xml and pdfs many years ago, (see the music page) but I had not created and sculpted the music images into scalar vector graphics (svg) form, one verse at a time. Nor had I fixed the WLC data to conform to Aleppo as much as I have this time round. It is still not perfect but it is closer to the original, and I am not convinced that even Aleppo is clear of the kinds of error I have encountered.

Maintaining the data is trickier than just using the music to prepare an arrangement. The music images are directly dependent on the Hebrew text. The four versions of the Hebrew text seen above in the image and text should remain consistent if the epub needs to be updated.

This is my process for getting the data out of the database into the e-pub:

1. Fix premature descents to the tonic – compare WLC verse by verse with MG Crown Aleppo codex. Check all internal descents to the tonic against mgketer site. I do this before generating the music. This step can be done for multiple chapters -- I keep going until I get tired. (Code to compare the two versions would be difficult to write. WLC uses a different level of Unicode from mgketer, coding sequences of diacritics differ even within the WLC, and there are a host of irrelevant notes and other comments that need to be ignored.) So far in about 300 chapters and about 6500 verses, I have corrected about 700 errors in the WLC. That's just over a 10% error rate. In what -- just over 100 years of copying? (Copyists get tired too!) The database remembers my changes so I can tell what I have done and when. I use three windows: 
• my proprietary update screen for the database, 
• the mgketer chapter, (in Hebrew only).
• a filter on my shortcut work file showing the notes to isolate the verses I suspect are in error. 
2. Generate music XML using my music generation page. This can be done for multiple chapters that have been verified. Takes a few seconds per chapter.
3. Run the data and the batch file for the chapter to html format. This program is one of many I have written for extracting data in various formats.
4. Open the music with Musescore, load the style file for one line per page. Open the bat file with a text editor and check the music 'pages' against the batch file. Page size is in the image:

1. Load the one-line style. [Saved in my Google Drive here]
2. Mark all beams as disconnected -- they will disappear (use multi-select). Make all triplets invisible – note stems are already invisible from program that generates xml.
3. Force returns on all verses – one verse per 'page'. (Every verse ends with a rest and a barline.) Fix alignment of text and check for slurs that displace text or make the lyrics line too low, adjust to under or over as needed. (Change all slurs to above - correct the few that get in the way of text rather than the many that get in the way of lyrics.)
4. (Poetry only -- add breath for ole-veyored – should automate this but tricky).
5. Adjust margins if needed.
6. Save to mscz file.
7. Verify the batch file against the music. Must agree on pages. Possible to insert a blank page and delete it later -- mark the bar as not included. (I have only had to do this once -- my techniques seem to be improving.)
8. Export svg to work area.
9. Use saved .bat file in cmd window or equivalent to rename the files.
10. Load svg files and html into e-pub.
11. Verify. (Calibre verify function will find errors in renaming if you miss them).
12. Delete the svg files in the work area.

This process takes from 10 minutes to an hour for longer prose chapters.

All Musescore files and batch rename files are saved in case steps 1 to 12 need repeating. Spot corrections are possible but tricky since the text and music are so integrated. E.g. a change in a word affects the music, the staff text, the Hebrew words with te’amim also and potentially, bar numbering. 

If a change is required, load the mscz file, make the changes and repeat the process from step 6.

I've documented this for my use -- but if anyone takes over what I am doing, who knows, it might give them some ideas.

What would motivate someone to do this task when nearly four-score years? Well, it's fascinating and it changes how you read. I hope that we (humanity) might start to read the Biblical text with love rather than our own fear and petty prejudices. So that we might learn to comfort each other, the people that Isaiah is referring to -- indirectly of course.