MuseScore Aims Make 50,000 New Braille Scores Available To Blind Musicians

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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[doti]

well, the blind musicians certainly have not seen it.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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

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[account_deleted]

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[xerxesVII]

Blind Melon

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[mrbester]

Andrea Bocelli

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[mrbester]

Jeff Healey.

A bunch more blind musicians on Wikipedia

[tepples]

Would it be cheating to refer to Wikipedia's list of notable blind musicians [wikipedia.org]?

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[locofungus]

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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[tlhIngan]

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.

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?

[Valdrax]

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?

[TheNastyInThePasty]

You read it first, memorize the notes, and then play it.

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[Hognoxious]

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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[account_deleted]

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[bossk538]

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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[reSonans]

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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[Anonymous Coward]

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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[rDouglass]

A lot of classical music is exceptionally complicated. Bach's fugues have up to five voices all going simultaneously. Plus, there are very important markings in scores, like dynamics, tempo markings, articulations, and performance instructions, all of which are impossible to divine accurately from listening to recordings. Worst of all, if you learn from a recording, you're not only learning the notes, you're learning that performer's interpretation, and you'll never be able to separate your understanding of

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[Valdrax]

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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[DMUTPeregrine]

So now you know what it's like to play the bagpipes!

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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[Valdrax]

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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[DMUTPeregrine]

The pipes are great... when properly tuned. The difficulty is tuning them, and then getting them to stay tuned. Since the tuning can change dramatically with air temperature and humidity the tuning will change as the warm, moist air from the piper's lungs goes through the pipes. Most pipers tune up well away from the audience, and guess what the temp/humidity changes will be like by the time they play, and do final adjustments just before a show. An incorrect guess results in a crime against humanity. A cor

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[account_deleted]

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[LifesABeach]

Just a thought; the Conductor, how would that person conduct or lead?

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[account_deleted]

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[gringer]

Beethoven was deaf, not blind.

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[account_deleted]

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[d'baba]

And how do you get to be in 'any kind of important concert'? Practice. Practice. Practice. And that's where having sheet music you can read comes in handy.

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[ockegheim]

To not really answer your question, blind singers (who do have both their hands free) follow the music with one hand and the lyrics with the other.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if they braille scored John Cage's 4'33"?

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[Hognoxious]

If they did, his estate would sue [google.com].

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[FooAtWFU]

Here you go. [about]

Accessibility

[Anonymous Coward]

"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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[rDouglass]

Are you talking about Musescore.com, or just ranting?

Why do they need money for this?

[wiredlogic]

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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[reSonans]

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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[rDouglass]

Building a web service that takes a MuseScore or MusicXML score, converts it, returns the braille score is a step in making music more accessible. Not every blind person can be expected to download Java libraries and apply them to XML files. Plus, out of the two libraries that look promising (Freedots and music21), Freedots is unmaintained and unlikely to be extended. The other library is less familiar to the MuseScore developers, so part of the cost estimate includes maintenance and feature development of

Fantastic open source music notation program!

[jerel]

I had a very small song I needed to put into sheet music, so I figured I'd download a demo of one of the main (Windows) notation programs, Sibelius. Great program, very full-featured and complicated. Awesome program, but HUGELY expensive for a guy like me. Then I grabbed MuseScore, which is free (as in beer), and WOW! What a fantastic program! It has most (if not all) of the same features as Sibelius, but it's open source! Now they are working to facilitate braille! I know anybody could be doing this, but t