Page 7, Music and Low Vision -- Strategies for People with Macular Degeneration,
Retinitis Pigmentosa, and Related Problems, Students who are Partially Sighted,
and those with Print-related Disabilities Who Don't Read Braille
Picture: A "big page", magnification 2x, made from a single page of
regular music at a copy center. The pole of the music stand on which it is sitting
appears at the bottom of the picture.
Music is for everyone, and an activity for people of all ages. At the National Resource Center we often receive phone calls from people experienceing a vision loss who are looking for ways to read sheet music, to continue playing the piano and see the music in front of them, or to keep up their careers, or social fulfillment of being active participants in an ensemble. The nature of low vision being what it is, one solution does not work for everybody, and what knowledge there is has come from people who have found solutions using their own inginuity.
Picture: Computer Enlarged music viewed in Finale 2003 on a 19 inch monitor.
Our major contributor to this page is Tom Green, a retired physicist, who happens to get a lot of personal enjoyment from playing with others in a recorder ensemble. Not wanting to give up this pursuit when macular degeneration started affecting other aspects of life, he conducted a whole gamut of experiments with magnifiers and copy machines to find a way to make his music large enough, and, when his vision worsened, developed a way to display enlarged music on a computer screen, controled by a foot switch. This work is reported in Section 1, which has three articles. The first article is for those who can benefit from techniques for enlarging music on paper. The second article describes Tom's computer setup based on the music notation computer program, Finale. A third article explains how to get started using the Finale-based computer system. The story of Mr. Green's efforts to continue playing music as his vision worsened can be found in Tom Green's article on our articles page.
Another approach to the presentation of enlarged music has been developed which is what we call the "slide show" method. It also features a foot switch to advance from one group of measures to the next. This method is based entirely on photographic images and does not involve any music notation software. This method is discussed in Section 2, where a link is provided to an article describing its most recent implementation using the computer program, PowerPoint.
Section 3 provides information on a low vision version of the program, Toccata.
After that, we provide a list of sources of music in large print, self-help resources, and literature on low vision and music we have found so far.
Finally, we provide a link to the web site of No-C-Notes Music. The No-C-note method provides a concise way of dictating music, simple or complex, on tape. Many people use this approach. If no amount of magnification will work, if someone has dyslexia or another learning disability, and braille is not an option, this may be something to explore.
Let us know if this page is useful to you. If you have found your own method, please share it with us. We will be happy to include it.
This page table of contents, five sections:
Section 1: From the Copy Machine to the Computer
Tom Green, a musician with Macular Degeneration, Provides How-to Information
on Making enlarged music on Paper, and His Use of a Portable Computer to Magnify
his part in an Ensemble.
Section 2: The "Slide Show" Method
of displaying enlarged music
Section 3: Off-site Vendor Link: MagniCCata
Section 4: Sources of Large-note Music and Other Resources
Section 5: Website of No-C-Notes, a Dictation Method for People with Print-related Disabilities
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