2001 Conference Proceedings
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Tools for the Blind Music Professional, Student and Hobbyist:
A Review of Technologies that Work!
William R. McCann
President
Dancing Dots Braille Music Technology, L.P.
PO Box 927
Valley Forge, PA 19482-0927
Tel: 610-783-6692
FAX: 610-783-6732
Email: info@dancingdots.com
WWW: www.dancingdots.com
Anyone who is blind who studies music has numerous challenges
to meet. Three of the most notable are: to become literate in
music braille, to obtain music materials In a timely way, and to
express his own musical ideas in conventional staff notation for
sighted players. In this presentation I will briefly describe and
demonstrate a number of educational resources and music
technologies that offer solutions that work. Unless noted to the
contrary, all of the items described below are available directly
from Dancing Dots.
Tools for Literacy
New Braille Music Curriculum
Dancing Dots will publish a new curriculum on braille music
designed for the mainstream teacher or music educator. The course
carefully sequenced phases of learning that start with basic
musicianship and lead to braille music reading and writing. The
sighted teacher and blind student meet on the common ground of
playing and singing music and learn to associate those sounds
with their expression in braille.
TACK-TILES®
Tack-tiles(r) are small rectangular blocks which show braille
symbols as large raised dots and also show the corresponding
print symbol for that braille character. The blocks snap on to a
board much like Lego toys. There is a set for English, Spanish,
French, math, computer braille and music braille. Each set
contains 320 Tack-tiles, 4 large boards and 4 smaller boards for
students.
How to Read Braille Music
An excellent introduction to music braille written by Bettye
Krolick, an internationally recognized authority in the field.
This text is written on a fifth-grade reading level and available
in print, braille and CD-ROM.
Tools for Timely Production of Music Materials
The GOODFEEL® Braille Music Translator
Dancing Dots has been a pioneer in the area of automatic braille
music transcription since 1992. At this writing people in
twenty-one countries are using GOODFEEL to produce music
materials quickly and accurately. The sighted user of GOODFEEL
need not know anything about music braille. Sighted copyists can
use music scanning programs and the Lime notation editor (see
below) to prepare files for GOODFEEL to automatically transcribe
into music braille. Blind users can also use GOODFEEL. Most of
our blind customers use Cakewalk (see below) to prepare files for
GOODFEEL.
Music Scanning Programs
SharpEye and SmartScore analyze a scanned image of a piece of
sheet music and converts it to a music file which can be passed
to Lime or Cakewalk or other mainstream music software programs
for further editing and printing. SmartScore has an integrated
playback feature and SharpEye can call the Windows Media Player
so that blind and sighted users can audition the results of
scanning before exporting the file.
Music Editors
Music editors are like word processors for music. Users can
input, edit and print out their arrangements and compositions.
Lime is mainstream music software designed for and by sighted
musicians. However, we have worked closely with Lime's developers
to allow GOODFEEL to import and transcribe Lime's notation files.
Lime allows displays a "Launch GOODFEEL" menu item on machines
where GOODFEEL is installed.
Lime is not usable by a blind person. However, Cakewalk
is!
Tools for Musical Self-expression
Cakewalk and CakeTalking
Cakewalk is mainstream music software which converts your PC
into a recording studio. Each instrumental part is recorded on
its own track and can be assigned its own sound. In addition,
some tracks can be assigned to record acoustic audio such as a
vocal or instrumental performance. All these sounds can be
blended together to make a sound recording.
Cakewalk also has a very useful notation feature. This feature
is especially handy to blind arrangers and composers since their
musical ideas can be easily converted to printed notation for
sighted players to perform.
CakeTalking customizes the JAWS for Windows screen reader to
work seamlessly with Cakewalk. CakeTalking comes with hundreds of
pages of tutorials written primarily for the blind user and
multi-level online help.
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