Articles - Part 1

Technology and Resources for the Blind Musician

By Bill McCann
President of Dancing Dots

The AT Journal is a publication of the AT Network and operates out of the
California Foundation for Independent Living Centers. To view the current
issue of the AT Journal, go to
www.atnet.org.

The curtain opens and the concert begins. Elizabeth Bottner, a 16-year-old violinist, is well prepared to play her part thanks to her personal determination, support of teachers and family and braille scores created by GOODFEEL, the world's first braille music translator. Liz is one of thousands of blind students all over the U.S. who can participate more fully in school ensembles and general music classes by having and knowing the score created automatically by GOODFEEL in standard music braille.

What did Liz have to accomplish to bring her to this point and what will she need to continue to do and learn to sustain her growth as a blind musician? In this, the first in a series of articles, I will describe the main challenges, which confront any blind person who wants to study music. I'll give an overview of some of the technology distributed by Dancing Dots, which supports the blind musician in meeting these challenges.

Dancing Dots now offers a complete curriculum to support the mainstream educator, vision teacher or parent who wants to promote braille music literacy. The company also provides music scanning, editing and transcription software that allows a non-specialist to function as a braille music transcriber. With new technology, a blind musician can employ his PC to notate his creative musical ideas in print for the sighted or to make a sophisticated, multi-track sound recording.

When a sighted person of any age wants to study music, one of the first tasks is to learn to read music. Seems logical that the same should follow for a blind scholar. But it is surprising how many blind people never learn to read music in braille. Louis Braille's system for reading and writing for the blind was formally accepted by his school in 1829. What most people don't know is that this brilliant French teenager's radical new system included music as well as literary notation.

Yet, even if most mainstream educators are aware that there is such a system (which is too frequently not the case), it is not at all certain that the student will be taught to read it. Why? For a number of reasons: the music educator, who may be afraid of the braille code, lacks the time and resources to understand the system in order to teach it to his student; the vision teacher or parent, who may be afraid of music, doesn't feel qualified to teach it, even though completely comfortable with the concept of braille

Recently, Dancing Dots published a new curriculum authored by Richard Taesch of the Southern California Conservatory of Music. "An Introduction to Music for the Blind Student: A Course in braille Music Reading, Part I," introduces the basics of braille music notation simply and clearly. The curriculum comes in three print and four braille volumes. For the benefit of the sighted teacher, braille music examples are displayed in a braille font with ample annotations explaining the meaning of new signs. This approach, one of the fruits of years of field-testing conducted by Taesch, goes a long way toward relieving anxieties about braille.

Taesch also keeps it simple for the less musically secure. If you can locate middle C on your keyboard (marking it with a little sticker is not cheating!), you can play enough for the student to get started. The student only needs access to a piano or electronic musical keyboard and a Perkins Brailler or any other manual device that permits one to emboss a paper with braille dots. Taesch has seen that, after a thorough introduction to music braille, the braille reader becomes the expert. The braille reader and the music educator can meet on the common ground of sound and sinning and the method of notating, whether in print or braile, becomes secondary.

The course stresses a time-honored method of sight singing known as solfeggio. A basic explanation of this system was immortalized in the popular song "Doe, A Deer" from The Sound of Music. Each degree of the scale is assigned its own syllable.

In future articles, I'll detail how music materials can be produced in braille on a local level in a timely fashion. I'll also discuss methods available to the blind composer/arranger who can now convert his PC into a multi-track-recording studio and use it to create sound recordings and printed editions of his musical ideas.

For more information please see www.dancingdots.com or call 610-783-6692.

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