9. Niggun Please: Jewish Liturgical Music Database
Yesterday I talked about a tool, the Jewish Book Builder, that would help individuals and communities create their own prayerbooks and looked at some current implementations of that idea, including the Open Siddur Project. In my post, I described “a future in which creating customized siddurim, bentshers, haggadot, chumashim and all manner of liturgical and scriptural books is as commonplace as making a mixtape (or an MP3 playlist, as it were).”
Today’s project is actually about further personalizing the prayer experience by providing a means for Jews to explore and learn the music of tefillah (Jewish prayer) by making for themselves downloadable audio playlists, and for the Jewish community to compile collectively the sum knowledge of their musical heritage by contributing to an open database of niggunim (liturgical melodies).
When I started getting more observant in my twenties, one of the hardest things for me was feeling comfortable during prayer services. My largest obstacle was being unfamiliar with the melodies to which people were singing the tefillah. The community in which I had learned to daven as a youth was not precisely one I would call “ecstatic” in its prayer, and I was more used to a silent, inward davening, than an exuberant, outward one. The community in which I was now participating was far more songful, and I was feeling embarrassed and intimated by my lack of knowledge. What I needed was a resource that would allow me to access these melodies so that I could learn on my own time, in my own way, so I could feel more confident the next time I was in shul. Sadly, no such thing existed at the time, and I had to spend many a Sabbath evening feeling uncomfortable before I was able to sing along.
Thankfully, in the years that have passed, a number of resources have been created to help address such a need. The most notable of these are SiddurAudio, the work of a Conservative rabbi who recorded himself singing Friday night services and posted the audio online; Shir Yaakov Feinstein-Feit’s Kol Zimrah Resources, created for congregants of the independent minyan he had co-founded in New York; Neohasid.org’s niggun database, which was also created by Shir Yaakov for Rabbi David Seidenberg; Chabad.org’s audio collection, which contains a vast number of popular Chabad niggunim; and An Invitation to Piyut, a massive Israeli database of liturgical music that, until recently, was available in Hebrew only. These are all great projects, and exceptionally valuable contributions, which have helped me immensely in my learning. However, they are lacking in some ways — particularly in user interface design and universal access to content.
Thus I came to envision my own Jewish liturgical music database. The inspiration for this project also came from Shir Yaakov, in fact, and a project of his called Sing! he had launched in 2003, wherein he was collecting recordings of niggunim sung by his friends in the havurah community. To organize the project, Shir was using AudioBlog, a now defunct service of Blogger.com, that would let users call a telephone number and record an audio message that would then be posted to their blog. Shir gave a phone number to his friends who would then call up and record themselves singing a given prayer or melody, and he would take the audio and then post it to his website.
I thought this was a marvelous idea, for a number of reasons, primarily having to do with copyright: The easiest way to avoid having to pay licensing fees for audio content was to not use copyrighted recordings. Having his friends sing their own renditions, which were not being resold for profit, got one around a lot of issues, like being sued by the Carlebach estate. But I loved that it was user generated content for other reasons as well. I see it as being thematically consistent with the Jewish tradition.
It occurred to me that there were other places to take this idea — other things that could be achieved with this technology. And so I started fleshing out this idea Shir Yaakov had been tinkering with into a full-fledged Web site I call Niggun Please. (And yes, Y-Love already read me the riot act for the title and I’m working on a better name.)
Niggun Please would take the best of SiddurAudio, Sing!, Chabad’s database and An Invitation to Piyyut, and combine them with the power of Wikipedia and Lala, creating one sleek interface that was driven by user generated content and the ability for users to create playlists of their favorite niggunim and tefillot, which they could download or post to their own Web sites.
(I apologize for the lack of mockups for this project. I didn’t have time to get them together today, but will hopefully be able to squeeze them in at some point early next week so that the following isn’t as difficult to visualize.)
Browse the archive by service (prayers sorted by service), liturgy (prayers and songs sorted alphabetically by title), melody title (where applicable), composer (sorted alphabetically by last name), era (sorted by historical timeline), movement (sorted by denomination or sect), region (sorted by nation, with map points), or keyword tag.
The database will contain four primary forms of content: The prayer page, the melody page, the composer page and the playlist page. While prayers will be pre-populated and unalterable, users can add and edit melody and composer pages. Playlists are created and managed by users.
The liturgy page would contain the Hebrew version of the “lyrics” along with English translation and transliteration, which could be downloaded as a PDF. Beneath it, would be a listing of melodies to which that prayer could be sung, along with recorded versions of the prayer sung to those melodies by site users. Users could rate (thumbs up or thumbs down) a given version, download an MP3, or add it to a playlist. They can also record their own version, whether through a browser-based recording interface (similar to that of the now-defunct Odeo.com) or by posting a manually uploaded MP3. When adding a recording, users can link to the profile of an existing melody or create a new melody profile.
A melody profile would contain the title, composer, era, region, movement, description and keyword tags for that given melody. It would contain the musical notation and/or chord chart (tablature) which could be created with a built-in tool similar to Noteflight or TabWriter and downloaded as a PDF or MIDI file. The page would also contain links to all the liturgy to which that melody could be applied, along with user recorded versions of the straight melody and the melody as applied to the liturgy. Users can rate, download or add the recordings to a playlist. They can record their own version. And they can also edit the melody profile to contribute their knowledge to the database.
A composer profile would contain the name, date of birth, date of death, biography, region and a photograph of a given composer. It would also contain a list of all melodies attributed to that composer in the database. Users can edit the page to contribute their knowledge.
Finally, the playlist page would enable users to manage the playlists they have created. They can add or remove playlists, edit and sort the content of playlists, play their playlists in an audio player, download their playlists as MP3s (zipped, with an M3U file), grab a Javascript embed link which will allow them to put an audio player for that playlist on their own Web site, or grab a URL to share with friends.
Imagine you’re leading services at your independent minyan next week, and you want to give folks a heads up in advance what the nussach will be. Build out a playlist, shoot a link over to your fellow congregants, or post it to your minyan’s Web site.
Or let’s just say you want to learn for yourself, like me. Create a playlist, download the MP3s, drop it into iTunes, stick it on your iPod, and learn the davening on your way to work.
Problem solved.
I recently discovered the Zemirot Database, a project of a group of young Conservative Jews who, in 2007, took the initiative unto themselves to create a project very similar to the one I’ve proposed here, but a bit more rudimentary. Beyond being limited to Shabbat zemirot (Sabbath songs), users do not have the ability to record directly within the browser (they must upload pre-recorded MP3s), nor can they rate others’ recordings, download them, or add them to an embeddable playlist. That said, the Zemirot Database is entirely kick-ass for what it is, and, for the time being, the best alternative to Niggun Please that exists today.
Tomorrow, more on creating personally meaningful prayer experiences.
