Section 2: The slide Show Method
Another approach to the presentation of enlarged music uses music that has
been prepared as slides, which can be presented one after the other with the
press of a foot switch. The link below is to a paper presented by James Carreon
and Joan Anderson of the california School for the Blind at the 2003 Technology
and Disabilities conference of the California State University Northridge.
Slides were prepared by scanning music into Photoshop and displayed using PowerPoint.
Background, Pros and Cons, by Thomas A. Green.
The first slide system we know about was developed by Richard Martin Friedmar and published in his August 1986 doctoral thesis, "An Evaluation of a New Reading Aid for the low vision Student". The slides were contained in a 120-slide carousel and projected onto a 12 by 18 inch screen. Dr. Friedmar obtained his doctoral degree at Toledo University, Toledo, Ohio.
The system discussed here has been developed and tested by James Carreon and Joan Anderson of The California School for the Blind. In this system, music is scanned into the computer program, Adobe Photoshop. Measures are cut out of the Photoshop display and pasted onto a slide in the computer program, PowerPoint. PowerPoint is then used to enlarge and display the measures as one slide of a slide show on a computer monitor screen.
The great advantage of the Slide Show Method is that the enlarged music is a graphics enlargement of the original scanned graphics image. It is therefor error free. In the notation method using Finale, discussed in Section 1, the conversion of the scanned image into musical notation is accompanied by errors and omissions which have to be corrected by editing the music notation file. The great advantage of the Music Notation Method is the publication quality, perfection, and legibility of the displayed music, independent of how poor the paper source music may be. In addition, in a Finale display, the size and number of measures on a page are readily changed, and the notes and symbols in any measure, are readily moved to improve legibility when two measures are displayed, one above the other, on a page. However, cutting and pasting is certainly simpler than the editing processes which give Finale its great flexibility.
We are still exploring the potential of the use of slides and will have more to report in terms of comparison as time goes on.
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