[Menvi-discuss] Some ideas for software tools

[Brandon Keith Biggs]

Hello,
I have been telling sighted people for years that they need to stop
reading the very inefficient written language and move to listening to
Voice Over or even better screen readers, but I know a total of 0
sighted people who have actually opened a book and listened to a whole
book all the way through when it is not a human reading. They have
never gotten to the point to where the words are going by so fast that
reading becomes something not unlike a movie with the most vivid
pictures, smells and sounds scrolling through their mind.
I have however read print, Braille, IPA and many of their variants and
believe reading has its place, but not in books or computers. Labels
yes, music yes, signs perhaps but less so now we are coming out with
computerized cars, name tags yes, labels yes. But not much more than
that. And this ridiculous spelling words where ridiculous can be
pronounced 5 different ways is so impractical it makes me cringe! IPA
and Italian have the idea right.

But in music textbooks the amount of musical examples is crazy and the
examples are really short and mostly simple. This is an escape tone,
this is a passing tone... Just hearing the examples would be like
someone looking at a picture of a face rather than seeing the person's
face in real life. They both have their advantages and disadvantages,
but it is a lot easier to be reading a description of a person's face
and just look at a picture rather than read a description and see the
real thing.
I would jump at the opportunity to have sound inserts in books and it
would most certainly make me want to read my theory textbooks. (read
to me means the interpretation of sensory retrieved data into my
mind). I can prove that learning most things in school by ear works
because I graduated high school with a 4.2 GPA and carry a 3.98 GPA in
college, so it is a moot point on what medium one inputs data into
their mind.
If I really wanted to, I could memorize my song from hearing it in
words, but it would be very annoying and time consuming.
Thanks,

Brandon Keith Biggs

On 8/7/13, Marc Sabatella <marc at outsideshore.com> wrote:
> On Aug 7, 2013, at 12:58 PM, Leena Dawes <leena.salim at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Exactly. However, even sighted people will make the distinction. "Do
>> you listen to books on tape?" is a common question as opposed to "Do
>> you read books on tape?" This isn't reading because spelling, grammar,
>> and other important aspects of literacy aren't learned.
>
> FWIW, as a sighted person, I'd agree that there is something of a
> distinction between reading a book versus hearing it read on tape, but I'd
> also say this is a *very* different distinction than the one that exists
> between listening to music and reading it.
>
> Whether you read a book or hear it read on tape, you are getting essentially
> the same information out of it: the actual contents of the book.  No one
> then expects you to "perform" that book - to read it yourself later.  And
> even if they did, I'd argue that there would be very little difference
> between learning to perform a book by reading it versus learning it by
> listening to it.  Assuming it was being read accurately, you'd still learn
> the exact same sequence of words, regardless of how complex the book was.  A
> book is essentially just a libear stream of words, and while maybe you
> wouldnt be sure of the location of every last comma, in practice that is
> normally justnnot that relevant - the comma is an aid to understanding, but
> that understanding would come just as easily from a tood reading.
>
> But in the case of music, I don't care how good your ears are - you are
> *not* likely to learn every single note of that piece just by listening to
> it.  So your eventual performance of it will be an approximation.  Sure, for
> sufficiently simple pieces, the approximation might be essentially perfect
> (depending on how accurate the recorded performance you learned from was),
> but you'd never know to what extent things like dynamics and other
> interpretive things were just accidents of how that performer played it
> versus what the composer actually specified.  And yes, for pop music or jazz
> or other music that is not normally fully notated in the first case, then
> even reading the music will mean you are learning one arranger's
> interpretation of the song rather than the actual essence of the song, which
> might indeed be better learned by ear.
>
> Still, there exists a huge amount of music for which lisening to it does not
> convey nearly the same level of information as reading it, from the
> perspective of allowing you to fully understand or reproduce it.  So if
> someone says "listening is a form of reading", I'd say yes, but only to a
> certain extent.  It might tell you everything you need to know about
> extraordinarily simple pieces, or most of what you need to know about
> somewhat more complex pieces, but at some point it is guaranteed to fall
> short.
>
> Marc
>
>
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-- 
Brandon Keith Biggs