Chanting the Psalms

But of course, we have no idea of what this music sounded like or how the text of the Psalms was set to music. The obvious conclusion from this is that God simply did not regard the form or style of music as important. But that they are meant for music is perhaps much more important than most churches think today. So the next question is how do we go about setting the text of the Psalm to music today?

Part of this question involves the importance of being faithful to the text. Because when you try to put the Psalms to a metered style of music (with a strict time signature), you immediately have trouble. So many composers alter the text and paraphrase it. Or just use fragments of a Psalm. Now this can be good and useful but there is still the need to set complete Psalms in exact wording to music.

One way to do this is to use chant. This may not sound very appealing to many of my church going friends but don't dismiss it without good consideration.

One of the resources in our class was a book published by Concordia Publishing here in St. Louis, Reading the Psalms with Luther. This book primarily provides some good insights into the meaning and purpose of each Psalm. But it also has these 8 chant (listed below) tones and each Psalm is pointed in a manner that allows you to chant each Psalm using one of the tones. These tones are fairly simple. And since there are no suggestions as to which tone will go with any particular Psalm, I decided to try and help with selecting a tone by giving a brief analysis. Thanks also to my interest in the Lilypond music typesetting program, I am able to share my thoughts and the tones with everyone. I have highlighted words and phrases so you can quickly determine the character of each tone. So by printing this out and going through the Luther's book, you can hopefully more easily determine which tone might work for a particular Psalm. Without the book it's a little more tricky as it adds the points where you change from the sustained tones. I suppose you could try to do this yourself but for the novice, this might be difficult.

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Converting Old LPs to Digital Form

Update

Sometimes, there are other types of vinyl artifacts that the pop filter will not get. There is a repair plugin that works quite well on these. You have to use the zoom tool and isolate the artifact very precisely. The repair plugin seems to use some kind of interpolation to smooth out the wave form in between the end points. So far, this tool works excellently and I have been able to eliminate some hiss and scratch type things from the recordings.

As far as selecting tracks, I am doing this visually. I check the time of a track and scroll through the display to find it. Then select the whole track. I don't see any kind of automated way to do this but I actually haven't looked very closely to see if there is. Perhaps because I am picky enough that I want to do it all precisely with my own eyes and ears. There is an export selection item on the file menu that allows you to save to whatever format you desire. I have been saving to WMA which I can then convert to Ogg or MP3 at a later time.

Many of the recordings I have are not re-released on CD so I don't think there is any information available from CDDB. But I haven't really looked into this. I don't see anything within Audacity in this regard.

As you can imagine, there can be a significant amount of time involved with selecting and refining all the tracks from an LP. This can depend on several factors. How picky you want to be with eliminating noise, pops, and hiss as well as what kind of shape the recordings are on are the most obvious factors.

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