MuseScore Aims Make 50,000 New Braille Scores Available To Blind Musicians 49
rDouglass writes "After meeting Eunah Choi, a blind pianist from S. Korea (video), and learning about the accessibility problems faced by classical musicians who cannot see, MuseScore is planning to radically increase the number of Braille scores available, to make them easier to find, and affordable to acquire. This effort is an extension to the Open Well-Tempered Clavier project, and will involve the creation of a free web-service that bridges the gap between open source MuseScore and MusicXML-to-Braille libraries. It also involves converting the 50,000 scores on MuseScore.com into Braille, and making the website more accessible to blind and vision impaired visitors."
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well, the blind musicians certainly have not seen it.
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And while we're at it, let's make the Van Gogh collection available to the blind as well.
This is *music* - the blind are blind, not deaf. What they are doing is not just good, it is good marketing - there are not that many blind musicians, but all the seeing musicians that read the story, are now aware of MuseScore.
If you want to compare it to something, compare it to movies and other broadcasts being available to deaf viewers. That's why there exists Closed Captioned and Described Video and is actually mandated in many jurisdictions.
BTW, Beethoven was deaf (by any legal definition) for most of
stevie wonder, ray charles (Score:2)
Who can name some other famous blind musicians?
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Blind Melon
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Andrea Bocelli
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Jeff Healey.
A bunch more blind musicians on Wikipedia (Score:3)
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Nobuyuki Tsujii
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6livoZENT4 [youtube.com]
I saw him at the BBC proms this year - totally awesome!
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Actually, closed captioning is for deaf viewers. Described Video is for blind viewers. May seem strange, but television and movies utilize both audio and video, so if you're deaf, you can still appreciate the visual content, if you're blind, you can appreciate the audio content.
What the O
How do you use braille sheet music? (Score:2)
At work, I can't really watch video, so could someone explain how a blind musician reads braille while playing the piano or most other instruments? Aren't both hands occupied?
(Please, no mods to me. Give them to the people who answer.)
Re:How do you use braille sheet music? (Score:5, Informative)
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Silly question: couldn't they just listen to it and learn the notes?
(I know I couldn't, but musically I'm incredibly untalented)
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Not necessarily, for example you can play the same note on different strings & frets on a guitar. You may be able to pick out the note but not get the proper fingering to play it 'correctly'.
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Nonsense. Nearly all the sheet music available for solo cello is edited, containing fingerings, phrasing, dynamics, bowings, etc. And if you play in an orchestra, the principal cellist will provide those for the score part.
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I'm a professional composer. Fingerings are usually only found in pedagogical music. Music for performance by a professional soloist, no. They don't need it. It clutters the notation, and you prevent the musician from finding the solution that is best for their hand(s).
The principal in an orchestral string section will usually only provide the bowing.
You're right about the rest, though.
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It's not hard to pick out a melody, but the underlying chords can be considerably more difficult for all but the very best musicians. In the movie "Amadeus," there's a scene where Mozart enters a room as the Prince is playing a short piece by Salieri in Mozart's honor. The Prince is doing a fairly poor job of it, and Mozart doesn't seem to be listening much at all. Later in the scene, he compliments Salieri on the piece and is presented with the sheet music. Mozart waves it away, saying he doesn't need
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I once had a part that required me to count 47 measures of rests before beginning, and I'm pretty sure I could still play my part in Ode to Joy. I consider myself lucky, the percussionists had to hum the main melodies as they played for their tests.
Heh. Reminds me of the time in high school when I had to play "Also Spake Zarathustra," which starts with several measures of a single low note and periodic timpani drumming before the rest of the band kicks in. The low, long note was to be played by the tubas, but I was the only one in our small band, so no stops for breath for eight slow measures.
The weeks of practice before the concert were a source of joy and mockery for the rest of the band as I had to train up my lung capacity to do it, and I usuall
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As a bagpiper, all the pipe music is traditionally learned by ear and memorized, and the pipes don't allow rests. Just blow as hard as you can to keep the bag inflated, and breathe in as fast as possible so the bag won't empty before you start to breathe out again. The pipes have always been compatible with the blind.
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The pipes have always been compatible with the blind.
And even more compatible with the deaf. Zing!
(I kid, I kid. I lived for a couple of years near a church were bagpipers practiced and used to open the windows to hear them every Wednesday. I really miss that, even though they only ever practiced the same 3-4 songs.)
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You are correct in the typical sense of a musician reading sheet music playing a piece they've never practiced before. However, I could see this useful for someone learning a new song. In addition, there are some interesting technologies for blind people, such as the tongue sensor [theguardian.com].
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Beethoven did it [lvbeethoven.com]
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Beethoven was deaf, not blind.
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Ah yea, brain fart on my part. I imagine it would be easier to be blind conducting than deaf.
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In 2007 I had a lot of choral music at my wedding, including an original piece. One of our friends is blind, so a few weeks before, I sent off all the music to the local Institute for the Blind where someone put all the music into braille. Automatic tools for putting music into braille would save choirmasters a lot of planning and free up the volunteer transcri
Do they have a braille score? (Score:1)
I wonder if they braille scored John Cage's 4'33"?
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If they did, his estate would sue [google.com].
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Accessibility (Score:1)
"making the website more accessible to blind and vision impaired visitors."
LOL. They could start by not following the stupid 'low contrast' meme which seems to have taken over the minds of almost every web designer on the planet, stop using grey text on a light blue background, stop using light blue text on a light blue background, stop using almost invisible light grey borders, underline links, put their navbar links inside buttons so they are clearly clickable, etc.etc.
But that would be asking too much. T
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Why do they need money for this? (Score:3)
If they already have scores encoded with MusicXML and there are libraries to translate that into a braille format why do they need money to carry out the translation?
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MusicXML doesn't cover every aspect of music notation. It covers the common-practice stuff pretty well, but out of 50,000 scores, I'm pretty sure they'll run up against notation symbols or graphic elements that aren't in MusicXML.
So I expect they will employ someone familiar with both notation and braille to ensure that the visual score matches the braille score.
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Fantastic open source music notation program! (Score:1)