Congregation B'nai Israel

This page has resources to help you learn trope, the special melodies used to read from the torah, haftorah and special readings. Resources can also be found from sources listed on our links page.

There are three formats available here. The first format is mp3 audio. If you don't already have a multimedia player on your PC, you can go to Real Audio to fetch their basic player for free. The mp3 files are created from the cantor's instructional tapes. Some advantages of using MP3 include the ability to loop through the music continuously rather than rewind a tape. Also, it is much easier to mark a section and play it back repeatedly.

The second format is created from a program called Noteworthy Composer. The Noteworthy Composer program displays and plays sheet music. Even if you cannot read sheet music, the visual aid of seeing the relationship between adjacent notes can be a big help in learning trope. For the Noteworthy Composer files, you need a PC (sorry to Macintosh users :-<) and a free player available here and directly from the Noteworthy web site.

The third format is MIDI, which should play within your browser, but without the sheet music as a visual aid.

Sheet music is available in pdf format, which can be read through the free Adobe Acrobat reader.

You should be able to click on the links below to start playing the associated files. If for some reason this does not work, you can try downloading the files first and then opening them with the appropriate player. To download a file, select its link with your right mouse button and choose the "Save Link as" option to download the file.

Here is what is currently available:

Trope	MP3 Format	Noteworthy	MIDI	Sheet Music	Used for
Torah	torah_trope.mp3				Weekly Reading
Haftorah	haftorah_trope.mp3				Haftorah
Eicha	eicha_trope.mp3	eicha.nwc	eicha.mid	eicha.pdf	Tisha B'Av
- Chapt. 3 only	eicha_ch3.mp3
Megilat Esther	esther.mp3	esther.nwc	esther.mid	esther.pdf	Purim