Shazam-style application recognizes music by Shlomo Carlebach
(JTA) — On Shabbat, Shlomo Tannor often encounters a problem common to regular synagogue-goers: He hears a melody that sounds familiar, but he can’t place it. Once Shabbat is over, he can’t look it up.
Often, these melodies come from one source: Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, perhaps the most important composer of Jewish religious music in the post-war period. To solve the problem, Tannor, an artificial intelligence engineer and amateur musician from Riverdale, New York, developed CarleBot – a melody recognition software that, like the music recognition app Shazam, can tell its users the source of Jewish prayer melodies.
More specifically, the app can tell users if the song was one of Carlebach’s many niggunim, or wordless tunes, as well as its name. The bot lets users sing or hum up to 20 seconds of a song into a computer’s microphone before attempting to identify it.
200 songs listed, more to follow
So far, CarleBot has about 200 songs in its library.
“Sometimes there are just these tunes floating around and I’m not sure where they came from,” Tannor said. “I just thought it would be an interesting project to just start with a well-defined library of songs, so Carlebach music, and just see if I can come up with something that works.”
The tool, Tannor says, will be of use to fans and critics alike of the “singing rabbi.” Carlebach’s catchy tunes — inspired by Hasidic music and the American folk revival movement of the 1960s and recorded on 25 albums spanning four decades — have become so ubiquitous in Jewish churches, schools and summer camps that singers sometimes don’t even realize they come from a single composer.
But in the post-Me-Too era, many Jewish places have begun to grapple with longstanding allegations of sexual harassment against Carlebach, which emerged in the years after his death in 1994. Today, many prayer leaders try to avoid his work—which is difficult, since much of it has become synonymous with modern Jewish music. (A Facebook group called “Beyond Carlebach: A Place to Share and Discover Jewish Liturgical Music” has more than 3,000 members.)
“Some people just love his music, others try to avoid the melodies,” Tannor said. “But either way, he had a huge influence on Jewish music and he just composed many, many melodies that are widely used – and many people aren’t aware that they came from Carlebach.”
According to ethnomusicologist Jessica Rode, CarleBot is the latest in a series of projects aimed at cataloging and preserving traditional Jewish music from around the world. She pointed to Gharamophone.com, which launched in 2017 and aims to collect music from the North African Jewish community, as well as larger archives such as SephardicMusic.org. The National Library of Israel also has a section for piyyutim, sacred songs, with melodies from various regions of the world.
Such archives can help people understand which songs have been passed down in Jewish communities for generations and which, like Carlebach’s compositions, are relatively new, says Rode, a professor at Georgetown University and author of “For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age.”
“There is the idea that something is preserved,” said Rode. “And then of course there is the work of musicologists who uncover it again and say: ‘No, that’s actually not such an old song.'”
The work of the listeners must also be taken into account when art is created by problematic people.
“He is one of the most controversial figures in the recent development of Jewish music,” Rode said of Carlebach. “So that’s interesting. But on the other hand, there is always the question of the separation between the artist” and the works he creates.
The bot, named by Tannor’s wife Dena, was built over the course of 10 hours over several weeks. It is loosely based on an earlier bot Tannor created called MishnahBot, which summarizes arguments and rulings from the compendium of Jewish Oral Law. That website has sample questions like “Is it permissible to build a sukkah on the back of a camel?” (The answer is yes.)
While Shazam recognizes recorded songs, Jewish ritual music is often paired with a series of prayers or hummed rather than played, and can sound different depending on the singer and tempo. CarleBot recognizes the a cappella vocal.
To collect the melodies, Tannor downloaded YouTube videos of the Carlebach songs and converted them into files that could be easily transcribed to different scales, taking into account the user’s imperfect hearing.
“I’m curious to learn more about their history or what the melody was originally composed for — what words it was originally meant to fit,” Tannor said. “I think that’s something that’s unique to Hasidic niggunim, that you could just use it for a lot of different words.”
He says niggunim resemble the melodies of nursery rhymes such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” whose melody is also sung to the alphabet, and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” (This melody is itself an adaptation of an 18th-century tune from the French-language song “Ah! vous dirai-je, maman.”)
“It’s very unique in the music landscape in general that these melodies are just attached to different words,” Tannor said. “I think that kind of thing happens in children’s songs too.”
For Joey Weisenberg, founder and director of the Rising Song Institute in Hadar, the malleability and improvisational nature of niggunim — and their spread by word of mouth — is what makes it all the fun.
“All of us who do this kind of thing have the pleasure of not knowing a nigger, which happens all the time, and then we ask friends if they know them,” Weisenberg told JTA. “And sometimes it’s quite obvious to someone else where that’s coming from, and most of the time it’s not.”
And while Weisenberg said “it would be great to have such a tool,” he added that for those who know, “in most cases, when it comes to a Carlebach tune, there is someone who knows the answer pretty quickly.”
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