Finding the psalms in the Aleppo codex

Here are a couple of images that illustrate the psalms and their music. It is difficult to search the codex because you really have to read it. I find my place using a technique of two consecutive words. If I can read those words and note their stems I can do a search for these two stems in sequence and that narrows the field considerably. Then I can look at a readable Hebrew text and verify that I am in the right place. My skills may improve, but right now at age about 14 that's where my reading is.

By the way, my search now uses SimHebrew - It really works as a left to right abbreviation of the square text. It works on more levels than I could have seen when I began 8 or so months ago.

So Psalm 96 and 1 Chronicles 16 were found by deciphering mlpni ihvh - but it narrowed down more easily with az irnnv. The next one was harder to find since I wasn't even sure that 145 was in the manuscript, but the Psalms are spaced in a way that makes them recognizable with a brief scan of the images so I was able to see that they preceded Chronicles and narrow them down accordingly. I am grateful to Ardon Bar-Hama for providing a link to the images of the Aleppo Codex that he has taken.

Psalm 96 in 1 Chronicles 16:33

The second image is the music we are currently working on. The manuscript is actually missing the verse for n. Verse 8 is for the eighth letter chet (k). You can read the letters vertically ה ט י כ ל מ [נ] ס ע

In the music I have illustrated the letters with a little polyphony. The text itself is chanted without elaboration. The 'illustrations' are of course in the text if one can read the accents. Haïk-Vantoura's key makes for very straightforward sight reading once you get used to it. I also restored the n verse from the DSS and from the Greek and applied accents to it so it had some music. (All the raw music is available on this site.)

Psalm 145 8-15