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

Posted by samzenpus on from the time-to-play dept.

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."

49 comments

  1. How do you use braille sheet music? by Valdrax · · 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.)

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    1. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by TheNastyInThePasty · · Score: 4, Informative

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

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    2. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by schneidafunk · · Score: 1

      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.

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    3. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by LifesABeach · · Score: 1

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

    4. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      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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    5. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by schneidafunk · · Score: 1

      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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    6. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by schneidafunk · · Score: 1

      Beethoven did it

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      Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
    7. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In my highschool orchestra we were required to play entire pieces from memory for our tests.

      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.

    8. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by gringer · · Score: 1

      Beethoven was deaf, not blind.

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    9. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by schneidafunk · · Score: 1

      Ah yea, brain fart on my part. I imagine it would be easier to be blind conducting than deaf.

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    10. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      by the time youre playing in any kind of important concert you should already know the score. Any sheet music in front of you is more for a reminder than anything else

    11. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by Valdrax · · Score: 2

      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 usually ended up beet red from effectively holding my breath / trying to squeeze every last bit of it out of my body for over a minute. Even better, I had to try to stuff as much in air in my lungs as I could before the first note, so I was pretty red and semi-bugeyed from the beginning too. I felt like that guy at the end of "Big Trouble in Little China."

      Good times.

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    12. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Perhaps a guitar is different, but I played the cello for 8 years or so and sheet music does not contain the fingerings. You're on your own for figuring them out

    13. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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 it. Everyone is in disbelief that he could know it after hearing it once, and the Prince demands that he prove it. Mozart sits and plays it perfectly, then adds a few flourishes, changes it a bit, makes it sound better, more polished, etc.

      The point is, everyone is amazed that Mozart can play this by ear. And this is Mozart! What chance do we mere mortals have of doing such a thing? Of course, he only heard it once, and he played it perfectly on his first attempt, and that was what caused most of the astonishment. Still, even after hearing a piece countless times and being intimately familiar with it, virtually none of us could simply sit at a piano and play it perfectly. We'd have to pick and peck and try out this chord and that, and it could take a very long time to work it all out. Why struggle with all that when we can simply get the sheet music and have all the correct notes in front of us instantly for the entire piece?

    14. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sheet Music for guitar does not contain fingering for notes, just tabliture and other shorthands. Many of the learn to play guitar books you purchase at a regular bookstore only cover tabliture and other shorthands. These are not proper notation.

      Like the cello you have the same note in the same octave in multiple locations.

    15. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by d'baba · · Score: 1

      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.

    16. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by bossk538 · · Score: 1

      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.

    17. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by DMUTPeregrine · · Score: 1

      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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    18. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by Valdrax · · Score: 2

      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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    19. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by DMUTPeregrine · · Score: 2

      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 correct guess results in beautiful, soulful music.
      Modern electronic tuners not built for the pipes will screw you up, since the pipes use just intonation with a somewhat odd temperament (optimized for 3 pentatonic scales) instead of being equal tempered for major and minor scales. Some of the worst offenses in pipe tuning come from the incorrect use of chromatic tuners, since "in tune" to the tuner results in terrible clashing of the chanter with the drones. (The D note becomes an augmented fourth from the drones, the interval known as "Diabolus in Musica" due to being the harshest dissonance possible with a normal scale.) Anyone learning the pipes should learn to tune them correctly, by ear, from a reference tone such as a tuning fork (hard to find since the pipes tune A = 470-480hz, depending on band) or get a proper pipe tuner.

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    20. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by reSonans · · Score: 1

      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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    21. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by ockegheim · · Score: 1

      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 transcribers to do other things.

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    22. Re:How do you use braille sheet music? by rDouglass · · Score: 1

      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 the music from the recording you learned from. Thus you've no chance at making an original interpretation.

  2. Re:Def musicians by doti · · Score: 1

    well, the blind musicians certainly have not seen it.

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  3. Do they have a braille score? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

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

    1. Re:Do they have a braille score? by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      If they did, his estate would sue.

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    2. Re:Do they have a braille score? by FooAtWFU · · Score: 1

      Here you go.

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  4. Re:excellent use of resources by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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 his life. Hmmm?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_van_Beethoven

  5. Re:excellent use of resources by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "And while we're at it, let's make the Van Gogh collection available to the blind as well."

    The Van Gogh collection is already available to the blind just as sheet music is. Anyone *can* describe the paintings to them just as anyone *can* read them the sheet music. This is just making the sheet music more accessible to blind people so y'know they don't have to commit a score to long term memory or have someone sit there reading them the music over and over again as they practice.

    Also your argument is flawed and you're being just being obtuse, and really kind of an ass. Of course no blind person is going to be an art (by art I mean visual art) but a blind person can for sure be a musician.

  6. Re:excellent use of resources by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    art critic* my bad

  7. stevie wonder, ray charles by schneidafunk · · Score: 1

    Who can name some other famous blind musicians?

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    1. Re:stevie wonder, ray charles by xerxesVII · · Score: 1

      Blind Melon

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    2. Re:stevie wonder, ray charles by mrbester · · Score: 1

      Andrea Bocelli

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    3. Re:stevie wonder, ray charles by mrbester · · Score: 1

      Jeff Healey.

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    4. Re:stevie wonder, ray charles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Grandpa Blind Lemon Yankovic.

    5. Re:stevie wonder, ray charles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't forget Blind Willie Witherspoon who taught Bleeding Gums Murphy all he knows about jazz.

    6. Re:stevie wonder, ray charles by locofungus · · Score: 1

      Nobuyuki Tsujii

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6livoZENT4

      I saw him at the BBC proms this year - totally awesome!

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  8. A bunch more blind musicians on Wikipedia by tepples · · Score: 2

    Would it be cheating to refer to Wikipedia's list of notable blind musicians?

  9. Accessibility by Anonymous Coward · · 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. The 'web designer's' ego is far more important than whether partially sighted people can use the site properly.

    1. Re:Accessibility by rDouglass · · Score: 1

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

  10. Why do they need money for this? by wiredlogic · · Score: 2

    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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    1. Re:Why do they need money for this? by reSonans · · Score: 2

      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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    2. Re:Why do they need money for this? by rDouglass · · Score: 1

      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 these libraries. Plus, we want to test this stuff, which, as sighted people who don't read braille, is a process that involves a lot of time and back-and-forth with blind musicians. So, in short, it will take software engineering and time. Ergo, money.

  11. Re:excellent use of resources by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

    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 OP describes would be a blind and deaf person trying to watch TV or a movie.

  12. Fantastic open source music notation program! by jerel · · Score: 1

    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 this is the kind of thing that makes open source stand out. Good for them! A big-name software company selling proprietary software would probably look at the size of the blind musician market and decide it didn't make economic sense. Since open source software isn't about making money on the software itself, they do this because it's a good thing to do and, yes, it raises their visibility for about 15 minutes, but it's really just cool to do! Good job.

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