“FaSoLa Minutes” is an app for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets that offers new ways to view and search the minutes of Sacred Harp singings from The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition since 1995. Singers can use the app to identify the song that’s been stuck in your head all morning, to learn more about the favorite songs of your singing friends, to read up on a singing you hope to attend, decide on a song to lead when the one you were planning on singing has already been used, and much more. Scholars can use the “FaSoLa Minutes” app to identify shifts in the makeup of singings, popularity of songs, and participation of individuals in this music culture. The app is available in the App Store and on Google Play for $4.99 (proceeds benefit SHMHA). SHMHA hosts a more limited web-based interface for browsing Sacred Harp minutes data. Read a review of the “FaSoLa Minutes” app by Clarissa Fetrow and an explanation of its entropy number by David Brodeur and David Smead.

Project team

• Mark T. Godfrey, lead developer, iOS developer
• Mike Richards, Android developeR
• Lauren Bock, designer
• Jesse P. Karlsberg, project manager

Every year, SHMHA publishes the Minutes and Directory of Sacred Harp Singings, a print volume compiling the proceedings at all Sacred Harp singings held during the previous year and submitted to the minutes book’s editors, along with a directory of coming singings and other information. Minutes are submitted by secretaries of singings and compiled by the editorial committee. The cost of the book is largely funded by a small fee collected from the donations of singers on the day of each singing. The minutes book includes:

• Directory of all scheduled singings for the coming year
• Directory of all known local singing groups in the United States and abroad
• Minutes of all singings from the previous year
• Singers who have died in the previous two years
• Instructions for submitting minutes

The Sacred Harp Minutes project will enable more streamlined production of future annual volumes of Minutes and Directory and will also renovate the minutes submission process, creating a mobile-friendly web-based submission process that ingests data from secretaries to feed both the print minutes book and the database featured on this site.

Project team

• Judy Caudle, editor
• David Ivey, associate editor
• Chris Thorman, lead production associate
• Carolyn Deacy, production associate

For its first hundred and twenty years, Sacred Harp singing was confined almost exclusively to six states in the southeastern United States: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. Beginning in the 1960s, with the support of southern singers, folk music enthusiasts in other parts of the country began forming their own conventions, modeled closely on the long-established format of historical singings. Growth in Sacred Harp outside the South since that time has been continually accelerating. Nathan Rees is using data from Sacred Harp Minutes including singing location names and corresponding GPS coordinates to map Sacred Harp singing’s recent spread.

For most of the twentieth century, minutes were published almost exclusively for singings in the six states named above; the 1985 Minutes Book documented singings in just two additional states: Kentucky and Connecticut. By 1995, there were entries for 175 singings, thirty of which took place in eighteen states outside the original six. The minutes for 2015 include a total of 289 singings. Alabama still holds the most, with ninety-two, but ninety-five singings took place in twenty-seven US states outside Sacred Harp’s pre-1970s territory. In addition, the 2015 minutes include thirty-three singings held across seven countries outside the United States.

Project team

• Nathan Rees, lead researcher
• Robert A. W. Dunn, GPS specialist

Using Sacred Harp Minutes data to systematically identify songs from The Sacred Harp represented in a corpus of recordings featuring 3,890 songs at Sacred Harp singings, this project uses a custom-designed beat tracking system to analyze how tempos selected by practitioners of this decentralized music culture correspond to historical prescriptive instructions for appropriate tempos. Singers at Sacred Harp singings take turns leading songs and have discretion over tempo. The 1844 Sacred Harp prescribed tempos in seconds per measure for each of the book’s seven “moods of time,” though as music educator Allen Britton noted in 1949, “whether or not the exact tempos ascribed to the various signs was strictly observed in practice we cannot tell.” A 1911 revision to the book’s introduction removed these instructions.

This project assess conventional wisdom among singers, which holds that tempos have increased during the twentieth century, determining that tempos for some moods of time have indeed increased, but that observed tempos for a majority are remarkably close to original prescriptions. The project suggests new approaches to extracting tempo information from beat onset data and structuring corpora used to evaluate beat tracking systems.

Project team

• Jesse P. Karlsberg, lead researcher
• Mark T. Godfrey, lead developer

The digitized minutes also make it possible to associate dozens of previously inaccessible private collections of home-made Sacred Harp singing recordings with time and place by documenting a sequence of songs in a given recording and algorithmically matching the sequence to minutes data. Numerous Sacred Harp singers from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Texas have collections of recordings they or their singing friends and relatives made at Sacred Harp singings since the 1950s on transcription discs, open-reel tapes, audiocassette tapes, or in born-digital formats. Few of these recordings have been digitized and many lack identifying information. The Sacred Harp Museum of SHPC and Pitts Theology Library at Emory University have partnered with Osiris Studio in Los Angeles to offer at-cost digitization and archiving of these recordings with the goal of preserving Sacred Harp recordings and increasing the breadth and accessibility of a corpus of known Sacred Harp recordings for additional research.

Even a sequence of a modest subset of songs sung at a given singing comprises a unique fingerprint of the event. The project uses a custom=designed algorithm to match these sequences of songs identified in the recordings with information from the Sacred Harp Minutes database to determine likely matches for these unidentified recordings. In the future, the team hopes to use identified singings as training data to develop a computational listening program to automatically identify sequences of songs in recordings to identify singing recordings without a need for manually documenting the content of the recordings.

Project team

• Mark T. Godfrey, lead developer
• Jesse P. Karlsberg, lead researcher
• Michael Graves, audio digitization specialist
• Nathan Rees, outreach coordinator
• Jonathon M. Smith, outreach coordinator