Santería DB: Contributing

Donations

This site was created and is being maintained for free. If you want to send the me some of the material on this page that I do not have yet, I would be delighted. Visit the wanted page to find out what I don’t have or contact me by email.

Note that some of the books of albums are missing information and details because I simply do not have them.

What is missing?

Analysis of Albums

Look at the albums index to find out which albums are not completely covered (at this moment this is most of them, the database covers little but we’re hoping coverage will grow with time as well as contributions).

Basically, what is needed for each song, is a list of the toques and cantos that are recorded, and the times in the songs where each toque or chant changes/start. Something in this format would do:

album
  songno 
    begintime, toque, chant
    begintime, toque, chant
    ...
  songno 
    begintime, toque, chant
    ...
  ...

For example, (this is just an example)

Abbilona Tambor Yoruba -- Yemaya
  3 
    0:00  nongo             aboyó mo tú mba o
    1:16  yakota            yemaya asesu
    1:47  yakota            sokun tani wó
    2:23  chachalokpafun    yemayá woyó
  4
    0:00  nongo             aboyó mo tú mba o
    1:16  yakota            yemaya asesu
    1:47  yakota            sokun tani wó
    2:23  chachalokpafun    yemayá woyó

Chants Transcriptions

Since they are reasonably short, I would like to eventually include transcriptions of the chants directly on the web site. Note that I will NOT include any material directly taken from the books, for obvious copyright reasons. I suggest you encourage the authors of these books and purchase them. However, if someone wishes to submit THEIR OWN transcriptions of the songs, I will be happy to include them on the web site.

Missing data

If you find any album, toque, canto, or book that is not covered in the database, please let us know and we will add it.

Reporting Errors

Please feel free to report any mistake you may find in the database. Note that most of the information is computed automatically from the analysis of the recordings, and if it appears incomplete, it’s simply that we haven’t covered enough example recordings for that particular chant or toque or combination.

How To Submit New Info

Send email to blais@furius.ca with the information formatted as simply as possible, so we can process it efficiently.

(Internally, we have to convert the data manually to XML format. If you know anything about XML and would like to contribute in a more efficient manner, contact us and we will send you a DTD and examples.)