Maqam Lessons
Arabic music and Maqam explained. Audio samples taken from Arabic classics; analyses, diagrams, and theory explained step-by-step — by Sami Abu Shumays.
Learn
The curriculum: introduction and glossary, the article Maqam Analysis: A Primer, four study tracks, and the seven-part Analysis Track.
Start here →Explore the System
Maqam as a network of ajnas: the jins and maqam reference pages, the pathways among them, and the 2010 Network Demo — its audio playable again.
Explore →Analyses
29 songs from the Egyptian and Syrian traditions, broken into segments by jins — 819 audio samples, browsable by song or by maqam.
Browse the songs →Corpus & Vocabulary
The Vocabulary of Maqam Rast: seven improvisations recorded in early-20th-century Egypt, parsed into sentences by register, singer, and melody type.
Read the sentences →About
The story of the three projects behind this site, acknowledgements, resources, and how to get in touch.
About the project →The App
The interactive analysis platform: waveform players, per-song timelines, the live maqam network, and statistics across the whole corpus.
Open the app →Every page of the original three sites is preserved here — the Analysis Site (2013), the Network Demo (2010), and the Rast Vocabulary project — reorganized into the sections above. Jins and maqam pages remain cross-linked to each other across all three, as they always were.