[Menvi-discuss] Hello from a new list member

[Toby Rush]

Marc, thank you so much for your message... I am thrilled to learn about
the AMNP, and I would of course love to have my project listed there upon
completion but I'd love to participate in other ways as well; it sounds
like the goals of the project line up exactly with my own.

I agree wholeheartedly that my utility will be most useful when combined
with others and I am designing it with that in mind. The program can export
files as brf files, ready to be sent to an embosser or notetaker. The
"native" format is very close to a brf file, but I use higher ASCII codes
to delineate braille characters that have multiple meanings (like the 1-4-5
symbol, which can be a C 8th note, a C 128th note, an indicator of four
beats per measure, or the numeral 4 in a key signature). The format will
definitely be made available, either under public domain or a very loose
Creative Commons license. While it can currently open brf files created by
other programs, I still need to provide some contextual interpretation of
the characters (again, determining which meaning that 1-4-5 character has).
The program itself will be free to use, and I'm thinking about making it
open source eventually if there is enough interest.

I also agree with your point about the viability of sighted folks working
with braille files directly, though I'll admit the big starry-eyed goal of
this project is to try to change that a bit. As I've been working with
students who have visual impairments, I've noticed that translation
utilities are fantastic and provide a quick way to make large amounts of
material accessible, but the end result is not always as clean and elegant
as a manually translated score. I've found that by taking a little extra
time (even with my limited familiarity with the braille music code) I can
create scores that are not only easier to read and more efficiently
designed but also beautiful and elegant. I am particularly proud of a
method came up with (though it seems natural, so perhaps others do it as
well) of using spacing and explicit barline characters to line up the parts
of a multi-instrument score in such a way that chords are shown in vertical
alignment. When my student was given this score for an analysis test, I was
thrilled to hear her say she had never had a score be so easy to read.

It is this type of thing that I feel like translation programs can't
provide, and I hope to fill the need with my utility. I envision someone
using a different utility to translate a file into braille, and then
bringing it into my utility to polish up before embossing. However, I don't
think it's unreasonable to think that there may be some who decide it's
easiest just to do it in braille "from scratch." I came to this conclusion
when designing sight-singing tests for my student, where I wanted music and
text interspersed on a single page.

Anyway, thanks again for the note; I'm going to send a little more detail
off-list if you are interested. I'm really excited to be part of this
community!


On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 10:30 AM, Marc Sabatella <marc at outsideshore.com>
wrote:

> On 06/04/2014 07:02 AM, Toby Rush wrote:
>
>  To that end, I am currently working on a web-based utility for creating
>> (not translating) braille music scores. While I am making it fully
>> accessible to screenreaders and braille displays, the target audience is
>> music educators — sighted or not — who are unfamiliar with braille music.
>> The goal of the program is to be a utility for creating braille scores and,
>> simultaneously, a means of learning the braille music code. While I'm
>> making fantastic progress, it's still very much in development... but I
>> hope to have something to share with the list by the end of the summer.
>>
>
> This is great to hear! When you have any information worth sharing on
> this, I would love to add it to my Accessible Music Notation Project blog:
>
> http://accessiblemusicnotation.wordpress.com/
>
> I've been mostly lurking since I initially joined the list last summer
> with a flurry of posts proposing ideas, but I am still active behind the
> scenes and hope within the next few months to have things worth sharing
> myself.
>
> As a sighted educator, my first area interest has been finding ways for
> others like me to more easily work with blind students, so your work
> intrigues me greatly. Up until now, the prospect of working with Braille
> directly has not seemed all that viable. I would still have the concern
> that if I have a "mixed" class, I prefer not to have to do everything
> twice, so the idea of creating work in standard notation software that I
> can then have converted to Braille still seems more natural to me. But
> anything that allows a sighted educator to understand and communicate with
> the blind student better is most welcome by me. Plus of course, more tools
> for creating Braille scores will be welcome by all I'm sure.
>
> Since much of what I have had in mind depends on integrating tools, I
> encourage you to think in terms of how other tools might communciate with
> yours - an API, perhaps, or documenting whatever format you might store
> files in if you plan to have something more high-level than the Braille
> code itself. For instance, one of things I would love to is to be able to
> create a text document with embedded musical examples that I created with
> the editor of my choice, then distribute that document to others, and have
> them be able to select an example press a button to bring up the example in
> the editor of their choice (possibly a "reader"). It would be interesting
> to consider what would be involved in allowing your tool to work in that
> sort of environment.
>
> Marc
>
>
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-- 
**************************************************
Dr. Toby W. Rush - trush1 at udayton.edu <trush1 at notes.udayton.edu>
Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Technology
University of Dayton
"Omnia voluntaria est."
**************************************************
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