A tool for musical notation in braille

Presenter: Arthur P. M. Tofani

This work researches visually-impaired person's difficulties when studying music as a university career, where musical information is usually forwarded as ink-printed sheet music and the translation of this material to braille involves specific skills and resource availability. In that sense, the musical production demanded from a blind student is accomplished by using braille notation, for taking notes or producing homework for disciplines like Harmony, Musical Analysis, or even to take tests. Clearly the information produced has to be submitted to a conversion process, and finally it can be reviewed by the professor or other students.

The main focus of this research is the understanding of braille music aspects and the problem of generating automatic ink-printed sheet music transcriptions, providing assistive resource for music students. For attaining this goal, an application was developed in order to receive braille music input and translate it to MusicXML format, which can be read by any of the widely MusicXML-compatible softwares available for reading, editing and printing music. The program is distributed as free software under LGPL license, as opposed to currently available alternatives.

The resulting application was tested by visually-impaired and non-visually impaired users, and reviewed trough the application of a survey. The collected data was analyzed, in search for variations on user experience and checking for software improvement needs, as well as uncovering further relevant matters on this subject.

When: September 13th, 2012

Where: Room 252-A, at IME/USP