As students head back to school this fall, some innovative educators across the country are finding new ways to work with blind students who want to read and/or create music or pursue an education in the musical arts. A few innovative programs and high-tech tools are entering the picture, using “Braille music” to transform the way people learn, not only in the classroom, but in libraries, museums, and even cyberspace.

Braille Music a Popular Program for Blind Students
The Music and Arts Center for Humanity (MACH) in Bridgeport, CT, hosts the Summer Institute for Blind College-Bound Musicians.

“Students from around the country come to attend this one-week intensive program to study Braille music, theory, and music technology necessary for the advanced study of music at the college level,” reads the program description. “After this immersion into an academic and musical experience on a school campus, students come away with new knowledge of resources, with a confidence inspired by practicing college living, and with a network of mentors and friends to turn to for help and encouragement as they continue their education.”

The Institute is a program of the National Resource Center for Blind Musicians, a division of MACH that groups music technology for the blind student ormusician and into two broad categories:
• software that works with print or Braille
• software that allows people to produce and manipulate music as sound, including for recording studio work.

Technology for Braille Transcription
GOODFEEL® notation software is one such suite of programs from Dancing Dots that’s designed to enable musicians to automatically convert several kinds of music files to Braille. To prepare and transcribe these files with GOODFEEL, musicians do not need to know how to read Braille music.

By combining programs like GOODFEEL with other technologies, schools can meet the varying needs of students in pursuit of a music education. For instance, teachers and transcribers who want to produce a finished Braille product can scan their music using a program called Sharp-Eye.

Next, they can edit the music with a program called Lime and produce the Braille copy with GOODFEEL. Dancing Dots also sells Sibelius, a sophisticated program that can produce publisher-quality print scores.

Another program, MusicShop, displays graphic notations to represent pitch and duration. It uses colored bars of varying lengths instead of traditional music notation, which can be confusing. In short, MusicShop can relate sound to what music looks like—it’s no longer limited to what it sounds like.

Blind Students Making Beautiful Music
Though the goal of achieving a truly inclusive educational environment remains a formidable challenge, these are just a sampling of the technologies available to give blind students who may be gifted musicians the ability to compose, arrange, and edit music; proofread it (in Braille when necessary); and produce a print version.

By putting these technologies to work, blind students can express themselves, compose, score, arrange, practice, and become successful musicians. And along the way, bring their unique voices to the world for the rest of us to enjoy.

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People who are blind and visually impaired may find cell phones difficult devices to operate.  Discover the new assistive phone technology for the blind, in Talking Cell Phones for the Blind.

See Screen Readers Help Blind Computer Users to learn more about assistive computer technology for blind or low vision individuals.