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+title: I Made a Songbook
+date: September 16, 2021 15:18
+---
+<p>
+A bit over a year ago I started exploring the world of Polish traditional music.
+I might write a post later talking more about my journey with that, but for
+today I just want to talk about a project related to this that I created last
+weekend: <a href='https://tuturutu.net'>tuturutu.net</a>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quick word of warning: it's 100% in Polish, so you probably won't get much use
+out of it if you're not a Polish speaker. Even if you are, you probably still
+won't get much use out of it if you're not interested in traditional music.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this post I'll go over three things: the <i>what</i>, the <i>why</i>, and the
+<i>how</i> of tuturutu.net.
+</p>
+
+<h3>What is tuturutu.net?</h3>
+
+<p>
+Right now the website is just a simple listing of a few songs from Polish
+villages, mostly the types that would be sung at a wedding, or otherwise related
+to the concept of love. I got most of the lyrics at a week-long workshop I went
+to a year ago.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most of the lyrics also have short sheet music notating the main vocal melody.
+For the most part, these are transcribed by ear by me, hopefully there aren't
+any inaccuracies. That said, the sheet music is only provided for reference, and
+honestly should not be used to learn the songs. Classical notation is an
+imperfect tool for this purpose, as in the real world the melodies often vary
+from performer to performer and freedoms can be taken with both rhythm and
+pitches. The best way to learn is to listen to performances (if possible, live
+performances; and in those cases, bonus points if it's in an environment where
+you can <i>join</i> the singing, not just listen to it like at a concert,
+further bonus points if you're dancing while doing it).
+
+<p>
+Where I could find them, recordings from YouTube or Bandcamp are linked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Each song is downloadable as an individual PDF for convenient offline storage,
+or for printing individual songs for distribution to a group learning them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the main page, there's also a PDF that's a songbook containing all of the
+songs. This is, in my opinion, the main "product" on the website. All the song
+pages on the website are nice if you need to quickly look something up, but if
+you're going to be needing the songbook at a party, it's probably best to
+download the whole thing and use that (it looks good on large screen ereaders,
+and has a clickable index). Very printable, too!
+</p>
+
+<h3>Why did I build this?</h3>
+
+<p>
+Primarily just for myself. In the recent months I'd been going to some parties
+where this sort of traditional music would be played, but when trying to Google
+some of the lyrics I would hear people singing, I wasn't able to find anything.
+Additionally, the lyrics I did have from the workshop I mentioned before were
+stored in my phone's camera's folder as photos I took of somebody else's phone
+screen showing a photo from a Facebook post of a laptop screen with a Word
+document open. Seriously. They weren't easy to find and definitely weren't
+searchable. So if I couldn't rely on lyrics websites that already exist, I
+decided I need to create something of my own. And the nice thing is, my website
+can be as clean as I want it to be, rather than a bloated mess of newsletter
+popups, cookie preferences, and flashing ads.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As mentioned above, the sheet music on the website is not really provided for
+anyone to use to learn the melodies. Instead, since currently I myself am the
+target audience of this website, the sheet music is there to remind <i>me</i>
+the melodies if I ever forget them (which I sometimes do). If anyone else finds
+them useful, great. Again, I do recommend learning by ear instead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For now the website is just a small index of a few songs I know. If I have the
+time and motivation (or funding/volunteers), I would love to expand it to a much
+wider and more general archive of this sort of music.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The songbook will probably receive a field test in the coming days, as the next
+edition of the workshop I went to last year is coming up, and we might end up
+using tuturutu.net as the "official" songbook.
+</p>
+
+<h3>How is tuturutu.net implemented technically?</h3>
+
+<p>
+Just like this website, tuturutu.net is a static site. I adapted the
+<a href='<%= git 'website' %>'>Ruby script that generates this website</a> to
+build the songbook website, which is simpler in some ways, and more complex in
+others. Instead of a list of blog articles written in (potentially templated)
+HTML, the sonbgook website has, for each song, up to three files:
+
+<ol>
+  <li> <code>song.txt</code>: a plain text file with the lyrics </li>
+  <li>
+    <code>song.ly</code>: a(n optional) Lilypond source file notating the
+    melody. <a href='http://lilypond.org/'>Lilypond</a> is a music notation
+    language with a compiler that beautifully engraves it as sheet music to
+    various formats.
+  </li>
+  <li>
+    <code>song.yaml</code>: a metadata file that contains information like
+    the song's title or links to recordings. In the future these might also
+    contain important tags like the genre of music, region from which the song
+    originates, etc.
+  </li>
+</ol>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Lilypond files are compiled into SVG images that are then displayed on
+individual songs' pages, PDFs, as well as the main songbook PDF. The PDFs
+themselves are compiled from LaTeX templates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Future additions to the website will probably include a search feature, tags,
+and, if enough songs are added, multiple songbooks that represent curated
+collections, rather than just the one that lists all the songs on the website.
+</p>