Swan song nearly completed

 I started this process in January of getting my data out of the database and into a form where it could provide 

1. a reading environment in epub or pdf form for people learning to read Hebrew text or music. 
2. a musical environment for hearing the words of Scripture in a form that never fails to surprise people who hear about it.
3. the music in a form that provides a starting point for those who want to develop it into songs and stories as illustrated on this blog over the last 15 years.
4. a translation that is open to criticism and changeable in the data manually for anyone who has the software to read the epub.
5. and all of it in a form that can be maintained by anyone with these two programs of publicly available software: Musescore, and Calibre. 

It's nearly done: 15 chapters left in 2 Chronicles to compare with Aleppo. (Perhaps a few hours work). Then about 40 chapters to format the music (a few days work). I hope in the coming months to analyse the types of differences between Aleppo and WLC, but I don't have a schedule or target for this at the moment. There are multiple types of differences. 

• Missing silluqs in WLC (a few, I did not explicitly look for them -- I found maybe 20 in the 7,000 or so verses I looked at).
• Additional silluqs in WLC -- thousands -- I would guess in 50% of the verses I looked at.
• Silluqs that should have been mercha or munach -- maybe 100 or so.
• Silluqs that seemed to move from one word to another.
• Silluqs that seemed to be imitating the same word repeated nearby.
• Silluqs on unstressed or stressed syllables.
• Silluqs on syllables with all sorts of different vowels, a, e, i, o, or u. I can't guess the frequencies.
• Silluqs (frequent) on common words like la (negative), ci (relative) , and mlc (king), Jerusalem and Judah and other less common names.
• Silluqs on prefixes, like l or m, but particularly frequent on h.
• Sometimes in a verse, all will be removed, or one is taken and the other left, or all of them are in both codices.

Maybe I will identify patterns more securely, but it will take a strategy I have not yet figured out.

Also I know I am prone to both error -- old eyes -- and tiredness. I will have missed several silluqs whose presence at the beginning of a verse would not have changed the music, but may be misleading in terms of stress if there is more than one accent on the lexical word. I will also have missed extra silluqs in Aleppo that are not in WLC if they were on verses that I did not look at. It's also possible that I may have deleted where I should not have. 

When I now read through the entire corpus to proof read my epub, I will look and listen for readability, but if I choose a verse to describe in the volume, I must verify that I have not made these blunders of omission.

Here's the percentage of verses with changes I have found - the last 15 chapters of 2 Chronicles will not change the >25% significantly for that book. (Ended up at 28.22%!)

Differences between Aleppo and Leningrad codices --
comparing silluq in WLC on tanach.us with Aleppo on mgketer.org

Next step is for me -- and anyone else who would volunteer -- to take a few examples for each volume and see if we can find distinct musical patterns in the differing volumes. I will probably try these out as blog posts. If you have verses you want, let me know in a comment. I will be back to blogging more regularly.

I would like this final work --that demonstrates the music embedded in the Biblical text-- to be widely available and used -- I don't know that I will give it away, but I hope it will not be lost. Let me know if you are interested. There are now 18 volumes, 929 music scores and supporting files.

Before Jonathan Wheeler disappeared from the web, he gave me -- and likely a lot of other folks -- a DVD of a huge amount of material on Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura (available here and here). I hope I will have done her work a service by making this final work stimulated in me -- partly by him --  since 2010.

If you want to take part in the exploration of the music, please send me an email at drobertmacd at gmail. Please let me know why you are interested and what skills you can bring to bear on the opportunity.