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."

Comments

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.

Re:How do you use braille sheet music?

[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 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.

Re:How do you use braille sheet music?

[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.)

Re:How do you use braille sheet music?

[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 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.

Re:excellent use of resources

[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 his life. Hmmm?

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

A bunch more blind musicians on Wikipedia

[tepples]

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

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?

Re:Why do they need money for this?

[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.