A Proposal for a Music Writing for the Visually Impaired

Abstract

Braille Musicography is the most used system by blind people for reading and writing music in the world. It is a transcription from the conventional music notation to Braille system, which symbols are generated by a matrix of raised dots of 2 columns and 3 rows. It shows two main difficulties that make it a hard tool for the blind musicians: (1) The number of music symbols exceeds by far the number of possible Braille dots combinations and (2) it is a linear system representing a bidimensional system. These two problems result in the need of using combinations of up to 4 Braille boxes to represent one musical symbol, and the repetition of Braille symbols that change meaning depending of the context. In order to give more clarity or simplicity in Braille scores, abbreviations and contractions are used, thus a fragment of music can sometimes be written in several ways. Because of all this, automatic transcription to Braille is complicated, sometimes not possible at all, and as a consequence blind people do not have full access to Braille scores. Besides the many efforts of people around the world, music scores transcription to Braille musicography is still a problem. In this work some of the Braille musicography problems are identified, and the need of a more efficient musicography is established. In order to create a new set of symbols for the blind and a useful system, which is an objective of a later stage of this work, it is important to notice that our fingertips have a delimited zone in which the density of receptors is high and allows a clear reading of a symbol. Outside this zone, the produced mental image is unclear and makes the reading tiresome and difficult. This and some other physiological and cognitive considerations have to be taken into account. Experience and ideas from the blind must be always regarded.