Re: Producing scores for visually impaired and blind people

[Jacques Menu]

David,

Braille music has alterations and all elements needed do indicate what is to be played, as well as specific repetition devices to avoid having to read again a fragment that was present before.

There’s also a clef indication, to simplify communication with sighted musicians. It is optional, since all notes are indicated with absolute octave, i.e. the current absolute octave holds until another one is specified.

The lyrics and such textual contents are transcribed using grade 2, i.e. contracted cells sequences. The contents is thus to be interpreted in the context a a natural language if they are present in the score.

And all this with only 64 6-dots cells. Readers of braille music are to be admired in my opinion…

Here is example 6.1-1 taken from BANA 2015, which is the most recent reference for braille music (http://brailleauthority.org/music/Music_Braille_Code_2015.pdf).

As mentionned previously in this thread, there may be differences in braille music as used in other countries, apart from text contents:

And to be complete, I attach the MusicXML file for this small score, together with the result of translating it to ASCII braille for embossing and reading on a braille display, and to Unicode UTF-8.

bana-6.1-1.xml
Description: XML document

bana-6.1-1_ASCII.brf
Description: Binary data

bana-6.1-1_UTF8.txt
Description: Text document

JM

Le 14 sept. 2019 à 16:13, Vaughan McAlley <address@hidden> a écrit :

On Sat, 14 Sep 2019 at 23:38, Karlin High <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On 9/14/2019 8:32 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
> > That's not "learning by ear" but "playing by ear".
>
> Ah, I can only imagine...
>
> "Here's a recording of the Tallis Scholars doing 'Spem In Alium.' Your
> job is to lean the Baritone 6 part from it. Go."
> --
> Karlin High
> Missouri, USA
>
>

I know two blind people who used to sing in choirs that sang a lot of music so needed good reading skills. They would get their music transcribed into braille by volunteers from the local society for blind people. They would read the music with one hand and the lyrics with the other, and at critical points a colleague would tap their shoulder to give them the conductor’s beat. One choral line is not really a musically complicated thing compared to keyboard music, and it all worked very well.

It looks like if you can get music into musicXML format you can convert that to braille. There must be more of this going on these days.

Vaughan

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