Sometimes, when we’re working on development of Lutheran Service Builder and other projects, we do research that results in data that’s very useful to us in preparing materials, and may not necessarily be very useful to you in any way other than in a “how interesting” sort of a way.

We’d like to share one particular piece of trivia with you for fun.

Today, we used some rudimentary spreadsheet calculations to determine how long it would take you—at the tempos provided in the MIDI files included with Lutheran Service Builder, to play through the entire set of hymns in Lutheran Service Book, covering every stanza and including an introduction that would perhaps be as long as a stanza-and-a-half for each respective hymn.

For your information (and ours), it would take 1,928 minutes and some change to play through the entire book from start to finish, with no breaks and at a very strict meter. That’s almost a day-and-a-half of straight hymn playing and/or singing, or roughly equivalent to 27 (very full) CDs worth of music.

Or, alternatively, that’s one very long hymn festival.