Empowering Blind Musicians to Compose and Notate Music with SoundCells

Abstract

Commercial technologies for notating music pose usage barriers to blind and visually impaired (BVI) musicians because they use graphic user interfaces and only produce visual, print scores. However, more research to date has studied how to make existing scores available in braille or large print rather than understand the needs and workflows of BVI musicians who notate new music. To address this gap, we conducted a six-week remote study in which six BVI musicians with wide-ranging backgrounds wrote original music culminating in a live performance. To create their scores, participants used SoundCells, a product of ongoing co-design and testing with BVI musicians that uses text to generate audio, print, and braille music. Across three interviews, participants offered diverse and nuanced views of how text input could facilitate creative expression. We uncovered how vision ability, music experience, and assistive technology preference affected how music was accessed and traversed. From this research, we provide design recommendations for improving SoundCells' input and output systems, discuss how visual cues embedded in SoundCells' syntax make learning and remembering harder for people who can't view it, and reflect on how our chosen methods resulted in high engagement.