The Methodology

The musical notation of the Bible consists of 19 signs named Té'amîm:

Figure 12: Cantillation signs

Té'amim means: taste, savor the food and also in that of intonation intelligence; reason; question; order. Someone has ``common sense'' or ta'am; faculty, a common sense and knowledge.

These signs have two purposes: that of prosody (prose) and that of psalmody: poetry.

The té'amîm are placed either below or above the Hebrew text, including vowel points:

Upper or lower, the signs have a totally different meaning: lower signs represent sounds of fixed height, evolutive, the height of the sounds are represented by the signs above them is conditional and depends on the height of the fixed scale-degree that precedes them.

The signs below represent successive degrees of a scale to the extent of the human voice.

There are eight signs below in prosody, seven in the chanting.