Swan Song

 Hi Friends,

I am not in any immediate danger apart from falling on the ice or in the snow, but I am beginning my good-byes; my swan song is taking shape.

My swan song is a visual presentation of the Music of the Bible, verse by verse with Scalar Vector Graphic images -- and zero commentary from me. This is a job that I was prepared for by the zigzag pattern of my learning (or not) over the first 60 years of my life. Nineteen years on out of this somewhat formless and in some areas undisciplined period, there has emerged a presentation of the jots and tittles of the Hebrew Bible, the like of which has not been seen on this earth to date. That's largely because it is detailed work requiring a host of different kinds of software and some theoretical discoveries that had not existed till the late 20th century. I express my dependency and gratitude to the many software engineers who have created the base tools I required for this final effort. 

I am indebted to many software engineers:

1. Kovid Goyal, who created the Calibre e-book software,
2. and the Musescore team,
3. also to the late David Driver, dearly missed, chief programmer who assisted so much in internationalizing my database interface,
4. and to the creators of tanach.us, the online version of the Westminster Leningrad codex and its web service,
5. and to the creators of mgketer.org for the availability of a readable Aleppo codex.
6. and to the creators of Oracle and MusicXML, tools that have been essential to me for this work.
7. Not to mention -- and I should have -- W3Cschools and their encouragement of the creation of high quality SVG graphics.

The presentation will be in (well maybe) 19 volumes, 0 to 18 -- like this: My status report as of today.

Proposed volumes, nothing like starting at volume 0, a precursor that is required for each of the others.

You can see that I am 22% through the process. It's longish and tiring but most of the presentation is automated. I verified book 3 of the Psalter since yesterday comparing the two editions, WLC and Aleppo for premature or confused silluqs - only 17 errors. I expect the prose sections to take a bit longer.

I am hoping to finish by the end of this year. The most difficult part is comparing tanach.us with mgketer. It would be possible to do software for this step rather than a filter on internal tonics in the musical phrase, then a visual scan of the Hebrew to compare the pointing to the Aleppo codex. But such a program would be more complex than the manual process which takes a minute per verse perhaps, but is also a good practice for reading the Hebrew.

You will see from the table this is an estimated 3 gigs of e-books -- I wonder who will read and study them and do a more complete analysis of the music than I have done these past 10 years. The introductory paragraphs to this series are available in draft form in e-book form me -- just ask for the link. I would welcome critical readers for each volume and feedback. My working title for the series is God's Tone of Voice. Message me if you are interested. See my 'about' page for contact info.

Each verse is like this:

Sample verse, not SVG since blogger doesn't support it;

Those of you learning Hebrew can see four ways of looking at the text: the pointed text, an eclectic WLC corrected from the Aleppo codex, a simple transcription for singing, the Hebrew without vowels so you can see and learn the cantillation signs alone, and the SimHebrew based on the full modern spelling of the words in a left to right simulation of Hebrew in the Latin character set. Above that is my English guide, and the type of verse by cadence.