Selah

MIDI rendering of the whole Hebrew Bible.

The whole Hebrew Bible, as MIDIHere is a fact almost nobody knows:The Hebrew Bible is written with a second layer of marks. Roughly one per word. They carry the chant: where the phrase turns, where it rests, where the voice rises. Scribes called Masoretes fixed them in writing over a thousand years ago. Every printed Hebrew Bible has carried them since.We ran all 23,206 verses through them and wrote the result out as MIDI. One file per verse, across 39 book folders. Drag one onto a track. Point it at any instrument you own. Play the Bible. That's the product.It's just MIDI. That's the feature.• Any DAW. FL Studio, Logic, Ableton, Cubase, Reaper, Bitwig, Studio One. Anything that opens a .mid. Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for.• One file per verse, named by book, chapter and verse. Ruth-004-011.mid is Ruth 4:11. Zero-padded, so it sorts properly.• Key of C, 120 BPM, nothing baked in. One clean melodic line with no instrument attached. The sound is your call. Transpose it, stretch it, chop it, reharmonise it.• The same verse is always the same tune. No generation. No randomness. No model guessing at a melody. A hand-written table, one figure per mark, that you could read yourself.The marks are real and ancient. The pitches are a rendering.The marks don't contain pitches at all. They aren't a staff. Each one marks where the stress falls, ranks the word in a hierarchy of pauses, and names a melodic figure. What that figure sounds like was never written down. It lived in people, and it still does. Yemenite, Lithuanian, Moroccan and Iraqi readers of the same verse, with the same marks, are not singing variations on one tune.Think chord chart, not sheet music. The symbol says "play the thing everyone here knows."So we rendered them in freygish (Ahavah Rabbah), through a hand-tuned table, one figure per mark. We picked it because it sounds like the tradition to a modern ear. The structure is faithful: which word carries which mark, where the phrase breaks, where it comes to rest.Psalms, Proverbs and Job: we don't know. Those three don't use the same marks as the rest of the Bible. They have their own set, and unlike the other 36 books, the way they were sung was lost.How lost? The Psalms come with performance directions written at the top. Lamnatzeach. Gittith. Al-tashcheth. Sheminit. Nobody has known what those words mean since before the Common Era. When the Bible was translated into Greek, around the second century BC, the translators had already lost them and guessed. The instructions for performing the Psalms stopped being readable while the Second Temple was still standing.So those three are our reading, not a recovered melody, and every one of them says so in its own README. Doing it properly is a scholarship job. We intend to do it, it will take as long as it takes, and everyone who already bought this pack gets it free when it lands.Just want one book first? Start with Ecclesiastes ($5). Free Scala tuning files that retune your synth for these MIDIs: https://riahstudio.com/selahWhat you can do with itMake anything. Release it, sell it, keep the money. No credit required, no royalty, no email.One line: ship music, not the files. Don't resell the MIDI as a pack. The full plain-English license is inside every download as LICENSE.md.About the Hebrew textThe text is Miqra according to the Masorah (MAM), edited by Seth (Avi) Kadish and contributors, published on Hebrew Wikisource and reached through Sefaria, licensed CC BY-SA. That text isn't ours and we make no claim on it. The credit travels with it and it stays CC BY-SA.No Hebrew text is inside the MIDI files. They hold pitches and durations, nothing else. What you're paying for is the software that read the marks and wrote the notes.RefundsEmail me and you get your money back. No form, no questions. Neither of us has time to argue about thirty bucks.

Selah offers the entire Hebrew Bible rendered as MIDI, utilizing ancient Masoretic marks to guide melodic interpretation. Each verse is presented individually, allowing users to import them into any DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and explore sound creation in a personalized manner. With tracks organized by book and verse, the app is designed for straightforward use without the need for installations or subscriptions. Users can engage creatively with the biblical texts, exploring their musical qualities in a way that's historically informed yet fresh.

Selah presents the entire Hebrew Bible as MIDI files, offering an innovative way to engage with ancient scripture. Each of the 23,206 verses is converted into MIDI, organized into 39 book folders, and ready to be loaded into any DAW. Users can drag and drop these files onto their tracks and experiment with different instruments. The application doesn’t require installation or sign-up, making it accessible for everyone. With the MIDI files named by book, chapter, and verse, users can easily locate and utilize them in their projects. The notes adhere to a structured melody derived from actual ancient markings, reflecting a tradition that has survived through generations. In addition to providing music creation capabilities, Selah aims to preserve and encourage further scholarly exploration of these texts.

https://riahstudio.gumroad.com/l/selah-whole-bible