[Menvi-discuss] Some ideas for software tools

[Dewald van Deventer]

Hi Mark. My name is Dewald.
Your ideas sound interesting, and i would like to try them out.
I have used Sibelius before, and haven't tried Lime out yet.
I am still a student, not in music, but piano tuning etc. But i have a 
music degree.
And my lecturor and me tried to figure stuff out, just how you and Sam 
tried everything.
The way i learnt to play the notes from a score wasn't the ideal method, 
but it worked.

I also wrote a thesis with the different ways of learning the notes from 
a score for a blind musician.

Is it ok for me to contact you offline?

Thank you,
Dewald.

D. L. van Deventer
Mobile: +1 (360) 521-4788
Email:
dewaldvandeventer at gmail.com
Skype:
(dewie007)

Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2013 19:09:10 -0600
From: Marc Sabatella <marc at outsideshore.com>
To: "menvi-discuss at menvi.org" <menvi-discuss at menvi.org>
Subject: [Menvi-discuss] Some ideas for software tools
Message-ID: <42CB0C17-28AE-4487-97D6-F6674D74F839 at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Hello, my name is Marc Sabatella, and I am a (sighted) music educator 
based in Denver, Colorado, USA.  I teach piano, music theory, jazz 
improvisation, and other topics for a number of different schools and 
organizations in the area.  Once upon a time I was also a software 
developer, and while those skills are a bit rusty, I can still get some 
things done.

Warning - this is going to be long, and I figure the discussion is apt 
to be a bit disruptive.  But please bear with me - I think you will all 
agree the subject matter is important, and hopefully some real good will 
come of this.

I have a number of ideas for software tools that I believe could make an 
impact in terms of the accessibility of music education and of notated 
music in general.  Obviously, such tools do exist already, and this is 
wonderful.  I understand the authors of some of these are on this list, 
and I am honored to be discussing these matters with you.

What I am suggesting is creating additional tools to extend what is 
already possible: to fill some gaps in current capabilities and to 
provide some integration to make it easier to use all of these tools 
together in interesting ways.  My goal is to make it as easy as possible 
for educators such as myself to make our teaching materials accessible 
to blind students and for the students to be able to function in as 
self-sufficient manner as possible in a mainstream music course or in 
their lives as working musicians.  So I am soliciting feedback on what 
needs people perceive to exist, on what types of tools would most usable 
- especially to the visually impaired - and on the general soundness of 
the things I will be proposing.

I should mention that I have already been working on some of these tools 
and I have been able put them into practice in my own teaching.  It is 
all at a very early stage of development, but it is far enough along to 
be useful to me and to convince me that there is significant potential 
here.  Other tools I envision are still in the planning stages, but 
these seem just as promising to me.

If this all sounds hopelessly vague, naive, or idealistic, don't worry - 
I have plenty of specifics I will be sharing soon enough. It's just hard 
to know where to start.  So let me begin with some background.

A few years ago I taught my first blind student, Samantha, in my jazz 
theory class at the University of Denver.  At the time I had no 
experience with or exposure to anything having to do with teaching 
visually impaired students.  Jazz theory at our school is a very 
specialized course for which there exists no standard textbook.  We use 
teaching materials - handouts, exercises, tests, and so forth - that I 
have developed myself over the years.  I did some research to see what 
tools and techniques existed to help me make my materials accessible to 
Sam, that would allow her to complete homework assignments and tests in 
a form I could grade, and that would allow her to complete projects such 
as notated transcriptions or arrangements for jazz ensembles on her 
own.  And I found a number of frustrating limitations in what looked 
feasible.

Apparently Sam had never learned Braille music.  Through grade school 
she had always had someone basically translate all notated materials for 
her aurally, and she would dictate to this translator when she wanted to 
notate something.  But this was not going to be an option here.  And 
both of us felt it important that she learn to be as autonomous as 
possible.  And while I felt Sam should learn Braille music for other 
reasons, I could not see how this in itself would completely serve our 
needs.  I would still need a way to make all of my own teaching 
materials accessible to her, and she would still need a way to complete 
assignments, tests, and projects in a form usable to me and/or other 
musicians.  And we had essentially no outside support, including money 
for expensive new software or hardware.

So, being jazz musicians after all, we improvised.  The system Sam and I 
worked out got the job done, but it is hardly anything I could recommend 
for general usage.  We relied a lot on a text-based music notation 
system called ABC.  There are free tools that can render ABC as standard 
notation, that can play it via MIDI, and that can convert between ABC 
and MusicXML.  Most WYSIWYG notation programs can import and export 
MusicXML.  I adapted my existing teaching materials to use ABC for all 
musical examples.  I shared the resulting text documents with her 
directly, and I wrote scripts that automatically converted ABC examples 
within a word processing document into graphics in standard notation 
(using existing tools). The scripts allowed me to use the very same 
documents with Sam and with the rest of my students.  I also used these 
tools to convert Sam's work (completed in ABC) into standard notation so 
I could print and grade it.  We worked with the developer of an ABC 
editing program to make his program more accessible, so she could more 
easily take advantage of the various tools for playing ABC via MIDI so 
she could hear what she was writing and otherwise have some of the 
benefits of a "real" notation program even though she was actually just 
typing text.

It all came together for us such that by end of the year, I was creating 
new handouts, assignments, and tests more easily than ever before, Sam 
was completing her work in a timely fashion with little additional input 
from me or anyone else, and I could grade her work right alongside the 
work from my other students.  But it took a pretty big investment of 
time and effort from both Sam and I to get to that point.

The work we did sat on the shelf for several years, but for various 
reasons, this summer I decided to dust it off and see what could be done 
to make the process usable by the average educator, student, and 
musician.  That is, ones with no programming background, ones with no 
desire to learn ABC or otherwise use any alternative to their favorite 
notation program, ones with no desire to rewrite their educational 
materials, ones who were already comfortable reading Braille music, ones 
who were already comfortable with software like Lime Aloud or who would 
find that type of approach the most natural way to read and write 
notated music, etc.

I have come to believe that the basic approach Sam and I took in terms 
of how we used a variety of tools together to enable me to create or 
adapt my educational materials and for her to complete assignments and 
take tests - this basic approach worked very well and is the way things 
ought to be.  It just shouldn't require learning ABC and cobbling all of 
this together by hand.

A writer should be able to create educational materials using his 
favorite word processor and favorite notation program, then just hit a 
button and have the document rendered in an accessible form - whether 
Braille, a ebook with examples read in interactive form as with Lime 
Aloud, or perhaps some other way ways (maybe even ABC - it's not a bad 
system, actually).  An ebook would also be useful for the sighted 
musician, as notated musical examples could automatially be hooked up to 
playback.  Conversely, the blind student should be able to take an 
electronic version of an assignment or test that combines text and 
notation and complete it directly, using Lime Aloud or other accessible 
software, in a form the teacher can than print and grade normally.  And 
for the blind student or musician interested in creating notated music 
from scatch, there should be a number of accessible options to select 
from, just as is the case for sighted musicians, to meet a variety of 
different needs in terms of capabilities and budgets.  I believe there 
are enough advantages to such a system even when not considering 
accessibility needs that it would not be difficult to convince educators 
and publishers to get on board.

Hopefully this gives you some idea of the scope of what I am proposing.  
Again, I think it is fantastic that tools like Lime Aloud and others 
exist already.  I just want to make it possible to integrate them all 
into a workflow that allows educators, students, and musicians to work 
together more easily, whether blind or sighted.

I should mention that I have been working for some time, on other 
matters, with the developers of the free and open source notation 
program MuseScore.   This program is not currently very strong in 
accessibility, but I believe it would be a relatively simple matter to 
improve this greatly, bringing it at least to the level of Sibelius with 
its accessibility add-ons.   The developers are on board with the idea, 
particularly if they don't have to do the work themselves and one of us 
- or someone we bring on board - can do it.  Such are the advantages of 
open source software: users can contribute what they want.  I have 
actually begun some of this work last week, adding some more keyboard 
navigation controls to the score view.  But more work will be needed in 
making sure the menus and dialogs take full advantage of the 
accessibility features available.

I should also mention that I have already developed an extension to 
LibreOffice that facilitates the insertion and management of notated 
examples created with MuseScore.  The extension currently includes a 
command to render examples as ABC (by first converting to MusicXML and 
then to ABC), but it would be completely straightforward to add more 
commands to render examples in other accessible forms using whatever 
other tools might exist to convert from MusicXML.

I will be more than happy to go more into specifics as the discussion 
progresses, but by now I am hoping some of you will have feedback above 
and beyond pointing out that I am in fact hopelessly vague, naive, or 
idealistic after all .

--
Marc Sabatella
marc at outsideshore.com