Santería DB: About This Site

History

This site was created out of my desire to learn the batá toques and chants that go with them, after a study trip in Cuba. Due to the complexity of this material, I found it necessary to organize my thoughts, as well as find a way to keep on learning while away from Cuba.

Since I listen to music all day during work (I’m always in front of a computer), every now and then I take a note when I recognize something, a toque, a chant. This database provides a space to browse the results of this accumulation of information. However, I do not plan to transcribe everything myself. I just add information as I go.

Hoping to get contributions to the database from other people, I decided to put this web site online. (It was also a good excuse to learn more about XML and CSS.) You can help me build this study resource by contributing.

Other Interesting Uses

Since I have converted all the albums I own to MP3 format, I built an option to generate little "play" buttons next to the recordings listings when I generate my local copy of the web site to browse directly on my computer. Pressing one of the play buttons then invokes a CGI script that calls an external controller program that instantly plays the referred section of the song. This is the ultimate study tool.

Future directions

• My database includes musicians as entities. I might update the site to include musicians links at some point;
• At some point I will start including traditional rumba songs in this database, or perhaps start another similar database just for rumba;
• Also, in the future I would like to link together the chants of candomblé with those of santería on a single site;
• I thought of including my scans of transcriptions and maintaining a repository of them, but I have not decided if I want to do that just yet.