Many hymns are copyrighted by the Australian megachurch Hillsong. The lyrics and melodies for these hymns tend to be very similar. For instance, they tend to use words like "Christ" and "Cross" a lot. Now, it occurs to me that these could be compressed as follows:

Have a library of words commonly used in Christian pentecostal or evangelical songs and represent each of them by a code. Have the entire NIV Bible as chanted word and encode it as a seven bit code for the book, an eight-bit code each for the chapter and verse, probably less actually considering that certain parts of the Bible are more popular than others for some people. In fact, the books of Ecclesiastes and James might as well be missed out altogether for example, which shortens the book code by a whole bit. Then include a further four bits for the number of words quoted.

Turn the melody into MIDI, connect the voice component to an instrument and autotune the lyrics appropriately.

Put all the information needed into a jukebox-style device which replaces the church organ and just have someone select the appropriate hymn from the audiovisual desk. The jukebox sings the song and the congregation sing along. In the meantime, a built-in EFT system transfers performance royalties from the church's bank account into Hillsong's.

Similar compression techniques could be applied to pop music, mantras, opera and positive affirmations.
-- nineteenthly, Jan 31 2011

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