What do those accents / diacritics signify. Called te'amim, marks of taste, they are patterns of signs above and below the Hebrew text that are used for singing the psalm. They are hand signals telling the singer to go up or come down or to ornament the passage. Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura determined in the best tradition of the application of Occam's razor, the the signs below the text are reciting notes in a scale, and those above the text are ornaments. If we apply her key to Psalm 1, here's what we get.
And here is a performance: Psalms 1
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