TETN 20444 Braille Music This video is posted online with the following chapter markers: Chapter 1. Why Braille Music? - Learning musical compositions by audio is limited and only allows the student to hear another person's interpretation of a musical composition. Chapter 2. What Audio Instruction Lacks - Basic layout and formatting of braille music code. Chapter 3. Braille Music Formatting - Overview of ways teachers can transcribe written music into braille music code. Chapter 4. Teacher Creation of Braille Music - Overview of software that students can use to compose and emboss musical scores and share it with print readers. Chapter 5. Questions & Online Resources - A few online resources to learn more about braille music or download compositions. TETN 20444 Braille Music Transcript Chapter 1. Why Braille Music? Sharon Nichols: My name is Sharon Nichols and I'm with Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. I'm in the Outreach Program and typically I work with technology and sometimes with educational consulting. Today's presentation is going to be on Braille Music. It's going to be rather introductory. It's an overview and so I wanted to show you those first page what we were going to be going over during this presentation. [ Start slide: ] Braille music presentation. Why braille music? Why not just have them listen and learn? What is unique to braille music that makes it different from printed music? What is lost with audio recording when that's all you're using? We'll look at some of the basic braille music samples and some braille music production, the teacher producing it, and some braille music production with the student producing the braille music. So those will be the topics I hope to address. [ End slide: ] Why braille music? Well, like any other braille source that we teach, it's all about literacy, and when we talk about literacy, and we don't just talk about audio literacy, we talk about braille music. And the reason that they need braille music, is not to just be able to play their instrument or their score with their orchestra, but they're also, even at high school level now, having to do music theory classes, and if they can't use some software or a Perkins braille writer and be able to produce their own music, then that part of the class doesn't work for them. So it is not just them being able to listen and learn, it is also them being able to produce the music themselves. I was going to -- at this point -- show you a short segment of a video. It is produced by NFB dot org, the National Federation of the Blind, and... as I said, it's just a portion of it because the entire video is ten minutes long and I am not sure we all have that attention span at this time of the day. [ Start video: ] Marcus Roberts: I'm a Jazz pianist. I first started playing when I was about eight, eight and a half. I learned how to read braille music at about twelve and a half. My teacher at the time he pretty much had to tie me down and make me do it, but once I did it and once I started to understand that it was not a limiting activity, but it was something that was going to broaden even my ability to hear music clearer and understand theory and harmony, then I got much more into it. Narrator: In print or braille, [ piano music ] written notation it is vital to a musician's development. Jessica Bachicha: It's a window into the composer's... thought process as the music was being written. [ Flute music ] Narrator: Music notation is an essential tool in the musician's toolbox. What happens when it is not there? Barbara Matthews: I am Barbara Matthews and I am Carol Sweeney's mom. One of frustrations that I had was when the kids in her school were beginning to learn print music and she didn't have the opportunity to begin to learn braille music at the same time. Antonio Guimaraes: Not having much instruction in braille music has kept me away from lots of good learning. Bill McCann: And when the blind person wanted to go and be in the school band, a lot of times the sighted music educator did not know there was such a thing as braille music, or even if he did, he was so anxious about it, that he just said, "Here, you just sit in the corner and listen." Louis Braille invented braille music. Louis Braille was an organist, a cellist, a pianist. He taught many subjects at the School for the Blind in Paris, but he had a passion for music, and he realized that what we need is a system where we could have it right under the tip of a finger we could feel the pitch of the note and the rhythm of the note. And that's exactly what he has done. Here is an elegant system that is very compact, and it still works today almost 200 years later. Jennifer Dunnam: There is no musical staff with lines and spaces in braille music. However braille music is a very logical and sensible system. There is a symbol for each of the seven basic notes of music [ piano scale playing ] and each of those symbols also includes the time value of the note, that is, [ piano music ] how long the note is to be held. There are particular symbols in braille music for modifying those notes as well, making them sharp or flat, for telling you which octave of the scale the note is to be played in. There are symbols for dynamic markings, for fingerings, for anything basically that you would see in a print music notation. [ Music end ] Roberts: Everything that's in the printed score is also in the braille score. This is movement three, it is marked Presto Agitato. There are Four sharps, C sharp minor, in 4/4 time. Second measure... [ Piano music ] There is never going to be a replacement for reading something for yourself and interpreting it in your own way, to build whatever life you want. [ Piano music ] [ End video: ] Nichols: So as I said that was just a short snippet of what I wanted to show you... about the... braille music with actual musicians themselves that are reading Braille. And if you heard Marcus he was talking about how he learned it when he was younger, but basically his Teacher of the Visually Impaired had to tie him down so that he would learn braille music. It's very common, and I am sure you have run across it in the school systems, that everybody says, well, you know, they could just listen and they learn it. And it's not just the teachers that are saying that, it's the students themselves, because it's a new code. They're already learning literary, they're already learning Nemeth and chemical compounds and now it is a different code. But for a lot of our students, they hope that in the future they're going to have a music career; and if they're going to have a music career and they go to university, they need to be able to do music theory and music theory involves composing your own music. So, to compose your own music, you need to either be able to use some form of braille writing utensil and being able to have somebody transcribe that for you, or there's software that allows to you do it with the JAWS screen reading program. [ Start slide: ] With braille music, you can continually go back and practice particular measures and entire scores. Because, when you're a braille musician, you're reading the Braille, but generally you don't have your hands on the instrument at the same time, so you're having to interpret [ End slide: ] and you're having to reread, and you're having to practice it over and over. Especially if you are on the piano that has two different lines, one for the right hand and one for the left hand. A lot of music is not just those notes. A lot of it is the dynamics and all the things that go along with it that change how the music sounds. And so that is a way that the musician who reads braille needs more time to be able to go back to that. [ Start slide: ] And to refer to musical -- specific musical attributes in the braille music. [ End slide: ] Okay. It's important to remember that when we look at a piece of music, we have the five staff markings, we have notes; the notes visually look different. They might have a tail on them. They might have a rest or they might have a dot or they might have a dot under or above them. All those things are visual and the student can immediately look and see that -- not that they know it all at first because they still have to learn it. But they can see it immediately and so it's something different, you have to be able to refer to all of those things; rests, dynamics, staccato, all of those. [ Start slide: ] And then to interpret the musical notation, not the sound of someone else interpreting the notation. [ End slide: ] A lot of times our students -- they're either just listening in the class or they might have tutorials and somebody is live and is playing the instrument with them. If it's another student, they might be like one level right above our kids or at the same level and so they are kind of struggling through the piece too. Which doesn't allow you to have those nuances of what the music really sounds like. And you can record the music and give it to the student, but once again, listening to a recording is a lot flatter sound than being able to hear it live. And listening a recording, typically, fast-forward, pause and stop and rewind is all the control you have over it. And I dare anybody to try that for a little while, and be very satisfied with listening to it, because it is very frustrating to be able to try to do that. [ Start slide: ] Chapter 2. What Audio Instruction Lacks On this slide, we will talk about what audio lacks that the braille music notation has. And that would be, it lacks the exact rhythms, articulation, et cetera, as the composer wrote it. And that's pretty much what I was talking about earlier, is that you can have the music [ End slide: ] you can be playing, you can be listening to it, but you want to have the direct input of what the composer meant to happen on that page. There's a reason why it's written down for us. We aren't just learning it from ear; we are learning it from the written page. [ Start slide: ] You want to learn notes and values, and rests and dynamics and fingerings. [ End slide: ] When you're learning notes and dynamics, you're going to see in a minute that, like most of the braille code, exceptions have to be made because you only have the six dots on how you're going to represent the different pieces of music and how you're going to represent the different notes. It's important to remember there aren't very many notes; they just change value and rhythm. And as far as the rests, those are unique and are tied to whether it is an eighth, a quarter, a half or a whole. So those are pretty much just memorization like the notes themselves. [ Start slide: ] Dynamics and fingerings -- fingerings are found in any string instrument, and words or rehearsal marks -- rehearsal marks might be what the band director [ End slide: ] is simply trying to draw their attention to as students. It doesn't have to be a formal part of the piece. It could be the choir director or the music teacher or the band director saying, "We're going to look at this portion of the piece and we are going to keep going back to it, and we'll be able to get to it quickly." [ Slide start: ] So when there's a rehearsal mark in a piece of music, if the braille reader cannot scan quickly, and find that rehearsal mark, then they're lost. And so that part of learning is not just learning the code itself, but all the many fun markings that go along with it. So for the piano there are also pedal markings, and then lyrics and their positioning in the music. [ Slide end: ] Pedal markings obviously would be in any instrument that has pedals. Probably the most common for our kids is piano. We don't have too many organ players anymore, but there are kids playing in their church choirs. Lyrics are a whole different beast, because if you think about it, and you think of braille as linear, then you have the line of music, but how do you have the lyrics represented? So what you're going to find is that you actually have a straight line of music and then you have a straight line of lyrics, and they're going to break at the same place at the end, but they're going to always be the lyrics and the music. And one other thing to remember about any lyrics, or any words, even if they're rehearsal markings, but any words that you put into a music braille score needs to be in unconstructed braille so that the student will not get confused on what is music and what is words. [ Slide start: ] Chapter 3. Braille Music Formatting Okay, let's talk a little bit about how braille music is represented on the page. It's represented in a linear format. And I at one time was working with Bill McCann, [ Slide end: ] and he was saying that he was very confused when they would talk about staff and they would talk about the notes being, you know, six lines above or four lines below. And he just couldn't figure that out conceptually, how that worked, because he had a single line of braille music under his fingers. So his music teacher one time used her hands and she said, "This is the staff, the five fingers and you have got your notes. You have got your F, A, C, E in between the staffs and then each staff has its note E, G, D and so forth. Now, that's the treble clef staff, but it helped Bill, he said, understand what they were talking about as far as directions on the staff. And when you talk about braille music -- we are getting ready to show you some examples, but you're talking about a linear format. So anything that has to do with changing a note's value or how it's going to be played, or its pitch, or its tempo, has to happen before you get to the note, because you need to know that before, and that's another reason why students will have to have the opportunity to read and reread before they even attempt to play from the score. [ Slide start: ] There are also the key signatures, the tempo, the octaves, the sharps and flats and the other markings like your forte, pianissimo, staccato. [ Slide end: ] I say all these words like I really know how to use them. I have learned a lot, but I am not much of a musician myself. When we talk about key signatures, that's your 4/4, and you'll see how that is represented in a minute, and when we talk about the tempo, if there is a tempo in the piece of music, that will be written out again in uncontracted letters. Not every piece of music or score has a tempo attached to it. Octaves. Once again remember the octaves are visually the height and the length that they are from the staff markings. Well, if that's the case, there has to be a way in braille for a simple mark to appear before a note, allowing the student to know that it's in this octave. And so octave markings, we're going to go over in a little while, and they're very easy to understand once you start to use them, and once again having not read music before I started all of this, I am amazed that I can even pick it up, but I can [ Slide start: ] Now, we get to the part where everybody goes, "Oh, yeah. Why is a letter D a middle C?" And I say it has nothing to do with literary. You have to let that go. At the time, Louis braille and composers, [ Slide end: ] they didn't use notes, per se. That was pretty modern, and when you think about that, you're thinking about Mozart and Chopin and all of those. Music started out auditorily, and it started out mostly in the churches where they were doing chanting and very simple songs generally represented of text. And so what you had was just orally learned down through the ages, but then they understood that if they didn't represent it from the book, they wanted it to be tied to one specific sound. So therefore they came up with this thing called solfege, and I hope that's close enough pronunciation. [ Slide start: ] The first system of functional names for the musical notes was the beginning symbols of the first six musical lines of the Latin hymn -- there is its name. I can't say Latin so that will be it. So the original sequence was U-t, however you pronounce that, Re Mi Fa Sol La. So, a lot of that you recognize, but it changed after we quit using Latin and went to more of the English language and now you notice Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do. [ Slide end: ] And basically anybody who has seen The Sound of Music has heard that over and over and over again. Once again, music was tied to solfege. Solfege started being used to separate the notes and make them always representative of a lyric or a book, and then it started in Latin and slowly went away from the Latin. It actually started in Greek, but we're not going to go there. But... so it changed to the Do Re Mi. And so at the time that Louis Braille was creating the Music braille Code, it was actually in flux and in transition from the Latin to the Do Re MI that we are familiar with. So, very important, just to let the fact go, that it is not tied a literary letter, and come on, there aren't that very many notes. It just takes some practice, and pretty soon, you don't even have to think about a D is a C. You don't have to do that. Pretty soon you will just start memorizing the notes and being able to go from there, but it's very important that when you are working with your students, do not go, "Oh, this doesn't make any sense. How can a middle C be the letter D?" Please don't let them hear that from you. It's almost as bad when sometimes students overhear how difficult braille is to learn to read. Things that we say influence the students, and influence how they react and interact with the braille. So please, it is simply a separate code that represents a different language, per se. [ Slide start: ] Okay, I want to you appreciate this. This is a score and it is simply the soprano part of a score. So it is very small. And this is what generally happens when I see students given music; [ Slide end: ] they are given a whole page of music. They haven't learned to read notes yet. They don't know any of the markings as far as sharps and flats. They don't know where the key signature is located because it is located in the same place every time. They don't understand when it has words and letters and when it has just the music. They don't know the measures. They don't understand any of the musical content. As far as they're concerned, when you hand them a sheet of music that looks like this, you're just handing them a bunch of bumps on a piece of paper. It isn't until we start teaching, and begin teaching, pretty much like they do in elementary school. How many times do they go over, "This a treble clef. This is a bass clef. This is the treble clef," over and over and over. If our students are reading that in braille at the same time, they're not going to have any problem when it is in the braille music piece; the same thing with the notes themselves. The students go over and over and over them, and they talk about measures. They learn these things piecemeal. You don't start out with a song and say, "Okay, what are all those physical representations in it?" They break it down to notes and they work on: What is an eighth note, what's a quarter note, what's a half note, and what's a whole note? All of those things need to be explained to students, and if you look at any worksheets that you're doing an elementary school when they are being introduced to it, it's very repetitive and that is when our students should start to learn the braille music code. Even if they are not going to go into music, they can learn the beginnings of the braille music code. Once again, look at this sheet of music, [ Slide start: ] and take in the fact that that would not mean much to anyone. [ Slide end: ] Let's talk about note names. [ Slide start: ] ou've got seven notes, right? Note names are shown in the upper four dots of the cell. Do not let yourself think of literary equivalence of these note names. Louis Braille did not call notes by letter names. He called them Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La Si. And it wasn't important to him that the same signs, in another context, stood for letters of the alphabet. So, if you look at the note name on the left-hand side, you will notice that the notes on the right-hand side in braille are all in the upper four cells of the braille. And we're going to go over that time and time again. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] Okay let's look at a single line of melody, [ Slide end: ] and what I want you to notice from this is remember earlier when I said when students are beginning to learn, basically you probably only want to represent the notes. And basically you only want to represent the note names. You're not adding whether it's a quarter, a half, a whole. You're letting them know repetitively, what is the name of that note. [ Slide start: ] So if you look at this simple piece, this simple melody, you will see that it is a treble clef and it's giving you a lot of information, that it's two sharps, 4/4 time. The only braille you're seeing on there right now are the notes. You are not seeing the values. You are not seeing whether they are dotted notes. You are just seeing the notes. And if you look from left to right, because I don't expect to you have your handout and be able to go back and forth quickly, but you have got a D, D, A, F, E, B, G, A, G, F, E, D, D. Okay? And we're going to refer to that and add more things into this simple line of melody as we learn the representations of a quarter, eighth and all of that. [ Slide end: ] So we're going to come back to some very simple melodies again and each time we are going to be adding something. I had to make some corrections because it almost seemed like they didn't make sense because as I was adding things on to the piece of music it almost threw off, to me, important things that you may have figured out before you get to them. So we will talk about that a little bit. Note time values. I want you to notice that -- let's start at the bottom of this chart in a minute [ Slide start: ] because what you have here is, remember you have those upper cells of the Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti, and what you have there are eighth notes. A lot of music classes, they'll start with quarter notes [ Slide end: ] because it is such an easy beat. [ tapping steady beat on table ] But in braille music, it is easier and makes more sense if you start with eighth notes. So that's something you might need to work with your student some, and you might want to mention it to the music teacher, is that, that is the basic note that the student will learn in the linear braille sheet. Let's look back at the chart [ Slide start: ] and you'll notice that the quarter is the same as the eighth except that it adds dot 6. The half adds dot 3. The whole note adds dot 3 and 6. As the note section of braille music chart above indicate, a single symbol shows both the pitch and the rhythmic length of a note. For instance, dots 1, 4, 5 indicate an eighth note of C. [ Slide end: ] Now, obviously anybody out there who has studied music or who has written music or even reads music knows that there are many other note values other than an eighth through whole. So basically what we have is a repetition. It kind of makes sense. You only have those few cells to add things, the three and the six, to change their values, but sometimes you'll have those same things but they might be sixteenths or they might be thirty-seconds, and that might seem a little confusing, but really it's not; because if you count, you know, six or seven notes under your fingers, you're going to know that those aren't whole notes, they're probably thirty-seconds. So don't get hung up on the fact that as your students are kind of learning this and maybe memorizing it, it's going to change in the future a little bit. That will be when they understand exactly how much value should be within a measure, per time, like 4/4 time. This was the hardest thing for me to learn because it sure seems like math, and it is math, because what you are doing is you are saying with that 4/4 time, you're saying how many beats are going to be in that measure, and 4/4 is kind of easy, because it is easier to count up the notes that way. But, you have to be able to match the measure with the time, and that will let you know if it is something like thirty-seconds or it's eighth notes. Here's a simple scale with note values, [ Slide start: ] and what you see here is you see that this has 7/4 time, and we don't care about that, we are not representing that, we are only looking at the notes, and if you notice, they're all quarter notes. They begin with the middle C and we'll talk about what that dot in front of them is in just a little bit. Hopefully you noticed that because it is the only place it shows up on this simple line of melody. So you have got your C, D, E, F, G, A, B. So there's your basic scale, and there is an extra marking in there so I kind of want you to think about why that marking might be there, and what it might tell the person who is reading the braille line. So once again these are quarter notes. You can tell that the C has the extra dot 6. They have all added the dot 6 to change the value of what the note is [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] Key and Time Signatures. These aren't really very hard. Basically it's a little bit harder to write it down than it is to explain it, so I'll read what I wrote and then we can talk about it. "Following the braille number sign, the upper number of the time signature is shown by the appropriate number in the upper half of the cell. The lower number of the signature is shown by a lower-cell numeral, without another number sign immediately following. If the lower number is four, it may look to you at first as if it were a period. Likewise, if it is an eight, you might mistake it for a question mark." That's why if you look at the example, you will see that it reads two sharps and this is the first time I am introducing the actual sharp symbol which is one of few that makes sense because it is the SH. So you have two sharps there, then you have your number sign, and you have your upper cell 4 and your lower cell 4 without any more number signs, that tells you it's 4/4 time and with two sharps. [ Slide end: ] I don't think this is really a very difficult part of the code to understand, and when you see where it is located, in a little bit, on the musical piece, you'll see that it really -- doesn't throw anybody off at all. So here is an example [ Slide start: ] of a different key and time signature, this one being a little bit more unique, for example a key signature with seven sharps would begin with the braille number sign followed by the upper-cell 7, followed by the sharp sign. The time signature would then be another number sign followed by the 12 with a dropped eight. It would read as seven sharps in the key signature of 12 over 8 as the time signature. [ Slide end: ] You'll see this a lot with braille music because you don't want to put seven sharps down below their fingers, because you don't really want them having reading and counting how many sharps. So if you give them a number sign and you say seven or eight or whatever, then you will be able to say, "Okay, there's seven sharps there," very quickly, and it's in 12/8, because that's the number I expect at the end. It has to be the two numbers for the time signature, but sometimes the key signature will be seven flats. It gets crazy sometimes. So any time it is over three, you are generally going to see a number sign and how many of the sharps or flats represent that key signature. Everybody okay out there? You can ask questions. It is always strange doing these. Measures. Okay, braille music is linear, and so it is under my fingers. So how do I know when I go to the next measure? How I do know when I have finished and if there's some signs in there I am not familiar with, I need to ask for help. I know that the measure is a space. So if you look at the example here, [ Slide start: ] measures are separated by blank cells representing the single bar lines. So when you see a piece of music with four quarter notes and then it has the little line, the bar sign, that would be a space in the braille music piece. Once again if you look at the sample, you will see something that isn't going to happen later because it's not correct, but what you have there is you have the two sharps and then your time signature is the 4/4 and then you have the note and a measure. You have three notes and a measure. You have two notes and a measure, and many notes. Here's the problem. I didn't know if somebody that was watching could actually know braille music and would be cringing right now [ Slide end: ] trying to figure out what's going on. Because, when I first did it, I was looking at it going, "That makes absolutely no sense to me," because if it's 4/4 time, it starts with a quarter note, and it is not its own measure. There is no way a quarter note can be its own measure. So basically this was just representing what measures would be. So I went back [ Slide start: ] and I put the line of print music in, and you'll notice that it has a quarter sign all by itself, and those of you who play music or read music might know this as a pickup note, or what's that fancy word, Anacrusis? You'll see also that there are some dotted notes and dotted notes change the value. So I thought I would add in correct form, because it is always on the top. It is going to tell you the key and time signature on the top before you read any music. So there's your two sharps in 4/4 time and there's your first measures and these are broken down correctly, and you will notice some of the dotted notes and we'll talk about those in a minute. So it's okay. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] Dotted Notes. A print dot that increases a note's value by one-half is shown by braille dot 3 in the next cell after the note. Dotted notes are pretty prevalent when I've been transcribing scores [ Slide end: ] so it's important that you understand where the dot is going to exist to actually make that note a dotted note, and once again, if the student has learned some of their time signatures and they're reading in the measure, they are going to go, "Okay, that can't be three quarter notes for 4/4." Something has to be different, and that's where they would find the dotted notes. So let's look at the slide once again. [ Slide start: ] And we see that a dotted half note, remember a half note has the dot 3 to show that it's a half note. The dotted half note is always going to be dotted in cell 2. So that will let you know that that's a dotted half, and, yes it matters that it's in cell 2. You'll see in a little while why that matters. You have got your half note, which, once again, is represented with the dot 3 added. You've got your quarter note, which is represented with the dot 6 added. And you've got your eighth, which is represented, with nothing but the letter sign [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] Okay, let's talk for a few minutes. I'm not sure, [ Slide end: ] but I think that some of your handouts, when they were going through the transition from Word -- from PowerPoint to Word, you might have ended up with ASCII, a lot of number signs and slashes and things like that. If you will open that Word file on your computer, highlight those symbols that don't mean anything to you, and choose, instead of Helvetica or Arial, choose a braille font and then you'll go, "Ah-ha!" All of a sudden the dots will be correct. Because, for those of you listening to me, right now, I have a feeling most of what you're seeing is the number sign, the slashes, the letters and it probably doesn't make much sense. So, if you've got it in a Word file, go ahead and open that on your computer, change the font of the ASCII characters only, to a braille font, and then you'll get the dots you are expecting. You're very patient with me for putting up with that. [ Slide start: ] Okay, so when we look at a single line with dotted notes, you'll notice that the piece is starting to build itself more. It's starting to look longer like you would expect any music to look. So once again on top, and it is always going to be above the music, is your two sharps in 4/4 time. Then you have that quarter note by itself, and we still don't know why it's over there by itself, but you'll notice the second note in has your dotted... note. Actually, I made a mistake earlier. The dot is right where you expect it to be on the third cell. Yikes! Okay, well we'll go over that again. We have a handout that shows all of it. So, on that single line with dotted notes, those of you who have a braille font, [ Slide end: ] and this shows up in the PowerPoint, if you have the PowerPoint, but those of you who have the braille represented by dots, will see that you have your quarter note, [ Slide start: ] then your half note and then you have a quarter note with a dot, dot 3. And then you go back to an eighth note because it is in the upper cell. Those of you who don't have the correct copy are probably going to have to refer back to some of this audio and figure out what it is. I would really appreciate if you can't change the Word into the braille font, [ Slide end: ] and if you could possibly get the PowerPoint, because the PowerPoint, it represents it more as a picture than it does as a font. But if you cannot get it in a form that shows you the dots for an actual representation of the braille, then e-mail me or call me and let's make sure you get that file so that you have something to refer to. [ Slide start: ] Okay, the next slide shows the heavy double bar that signals the end of the music in print. It's represented by the two-cell sign, 1, 2, 6 and 1, 3. Remember this is the ending bar. [ Slide end: ] It's important to understand that you'll still have the 1, 2, 6, but it'll be different configurations for different bars, like repeat bars and whether it repeats to the left or to the right. All of those have a unique sign, but they all are similar so that you can figure out that they're a bar sign. [ Slide start: ] The next slide shows you the piece again; the same line of music, and it says, "The beginning of a musical score is the number of the first measure at the margin, followed by a blank cell. If, as in this case, the first measure is not a full measure, the measure is given the number zero." If you look at the piece it might start making sense why that quarter note's all by itself. And the reason you would know in braille that it was a pickup note, is because instead of the measure being labeled number one, it would be labeled zero. And that lets the student, or whoever is reading the score; know that that's a pickup note. And you'll notice in this example, hopefully you have it with the dots, that you'll notice the dotted notes and you'll notice the measures with the space in between them [ Slide end: ] Remember earlier when I was talking about the octaves and how for a blind student they don't get that spatial quality and obviously it is not just a guess or a listen to when the octave goes up, of the note? They actually have a representation so that they know exactly which octave that note is. It also gets very technical with intervals and things. But right now, for the purpose of this overview, I am only going to talk about octaves. So if you look at the slide, [ Slide start: ] it says, "Braille music does not include staves, or staff marks, five lines and four spaces, or clef signs as shown below. Print music notation is graphical, in vertical and horizontal space. An octave sign designates the note's specific place in the full range of pitches. The braille octave marks are all right-cell signs." So that they're up against the note, and this kind of makes sense, if you think about it, [ Slide end: ] the nice thing is you don't -- you still want them learning when they're younger the treble clef, the bass, the tenor because those are things that are going to be referred to constantly, and it doesn't hurt them to learn it, but you do need to understand that when they're actually going to be reading a braille music piece or score there is not going to be a treble or a bass clef sign, and the reason for that is because they have a single line. It doesn't matter to them whether it's treble or bass. It matters what that dot is for which octave it's going to be in. Let's look at the handout again [ Slide start: ] You'll notice that at the beginning of the print music, it's way far down there at the bottom and so automatically the students know that's the bass clef. Well, the braille student would know it because it's an upper cell, the dot 4. Remember, they're always against the letter; they're always in that right-hand side of the cell. And then you go up to the second and then the third, and if you look at the fourth it's probably the most common one you're used to, it's is a dot 5 because that is middle C. And so a lot of their early music will be represented that way. [ Slide end: ] So in a minute, when we're looking at some more print music with the braille music, we're going to point out the octave marks and which octave it changes it to, and -- here's how I learned braille music. I would get a piece of music from the national library service, the easiest one could I find, or I would only use one page of it, and I would sit there, and with the music notation book that is available from NLS or that you can download from... BANA, I believe, I would painstakingly flip back and forth through the pages and learn these signs. And even though it's tedious, it helps if you can read the notes themselves because you'll know, "Okay, there's a staccato with this so in braille music there has to be a way to show that." So you won't have to be looking quite as much as I did. But it helps if you will take a braille sheet of music and you will -- with your pencil -- try to write down what the representation would be in the print music. It is the same thing we did when we were learning braille, literary braille notation, and sometimes it's the same as Nemeth, although Nemeth is unique with the equations and things. But, I know that most Teachers of Visually Impaired -- I'll speak for myself -- I know that most Teachers for the Visually Impaired are not 100 percent familiar with the Nemeth code. However you make sure that whatever your student is getting ready to be introduced in the next month, or the next couple of weeks, that you have that from the book and you are ready to teach them that Nemeth code skill. So, it's the same with the braille music. You have to do some homework on what these signs are as you slowly start rolling them into the score. At first you're going to work with just the notes, then you're going to work with the note values, as far as speeding up or slowing down, and it helps to kind of tap on the table [ tapping on table ] for the student, because if you're tapping, they're desperately trying to stay up with their notes and call them out to you, but they'll get better at it. Then you add in some dotted notes. Then you add in the key signature. So at the same time that you're going to be teaching this to your student, you are going to be learning it, so that you are more familiar with what it looks like in the score. So once again, let's look at this slide. [ Slide start: ] Those will be represented in braille by either dot 4, 5, 6, or any combination of those cells. And that will let the student know, "Okay, this is a middle C. Okay, this is a second octave C." They have to be able to know that. And you'll notice that it did kind of copy those who have dots. But like on the fourth octave you will notice it is a dot 5 and then for the note it is actually the C and it is a half note. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] Okay, let's look at the rests. The rests are important in braille music and in print music to let the student know when to pause. The braille signs for rests are as follows: the whole note, which is just a round note and it is represented by the small black square below the line that Brian, who helps me with music, says it is a hole in the line you know it's a whole rest. It is represented basically by, I won't say it, but by 1, 3, and 4, and you know what that is. But 1, 3, and 4 is the whole rest. The half note, [ Slide end: ] Brian told me that with the half note, which looks graphically the same as a whole note, it would be represented, he said, like a hat on top of the line. So the whole note is like a hole below the line and a half rest is a hat on top of that line. And then you have also on the slide, [ Slide start: ] the representation of the quarter note and the rest, which is very pretty. I don't know what to call that symbol, and you'll notice that if you look at the whole note dots it is the 1, 3, and 4. If you look at the half note dots, it is 1, 3, 6. So they're just kind of flipped, exactly like they would be in print and in graphic music. So think of it that way. The one is flipped and one represents the whole and one represents the half. Even though to me they're backwards... [ Slide end: ] because it seems to me the one below should be the whole note. Anyway, looking back at the slide, [ Slide start: ] you'll see that the quarter note is 1, 2, 3, 6; so that is the representation of the quarter note. The eighth rest is just 1, 3, 4, 6, like an X. And that's the eighth note rest. The sixteenth rest, because you'll see it a lot, too, looks like the eighth note but with an extra little marking on it. They look very identical and if you'll notice, remember we talked about this, about how a lot of this is repeated but has a different value. If you look at the sixteenth rest, it's visually different but the braille is the same as a whole note rest; it's 1, 3, 4. And the reason I told you'll be able to tell whether that is a sixteenth note or a whole note is, obviously, the whole note rest is going to be by itself in a measure whereas the sixteenth should be represented with quite a few notes. Everybody okay out there? Okay. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] Rests in music. I have made some of these dots blue and some of them red. Basically, if you look at the blue, it's the first time you have seen it, but it is a tempo marking. If you noticed in the print music, it says "gently." So that shows up first. In uncontracted braille it says "gently" and it has the period. And then it says the key signature and time signature. So you've got gently and then the number sign, four flats, and you've got the number sign, six, eight for the time signature. And the ones that are red -- the dots are red in this are your rests. If you look to the end of first line you will see the quarter note rest and the eighth rest. If you look at the beginning of the next line, you will see the whole note rest. [ Slide end: ] Now, that matches the linear form of the print music that's showing, but that once again is really only for instructional purposes. Braille music is one of the few formats that you can be a little bit more generous with how you... braille it, because what you are wanting to do is make sense to the person who is reading it. You kind of want to make sense with where you start the next measure and it might not match the print. More than likely nine times out of ten it will not. Okay. On the next -- we won't go into the next one so much -- but on the next slide, I did mention the staccato and the accent. [ Slide start: ] And the staccato is 2, 3, 6 and the accent is 4, 6 and then 2, 3, 6, because they're similar to what they do to the note value. Once again, you have that same piece of music that we just added onto in print. Down below now, you notice I have notes, measure markings. So I have the measure one and I have the measure seven. So it lets you know where in that piece you are and you will see that the ones in red are either your staccato markings that match the notes with the dot right below them, or there's a 4, 6, 2, 3, 6 which matches the accent mark, which is like a side-ways D and it can be above the note or below the note. Moderator: Karen, a comment that they can't see the top and the bottom -- on these margins. I'm wondering if you could go out of the slide show where it is just the slide so we will get all of that. Nichols: I can try. Moderator: Or maybe that. Nichols: A little too much. Just a second, I am not very good with a mouse, you guys. Moderator: I think that looks better. Nichols: Does that kind of show you -- you'll notice that there are actually four lines of braille music. And there are only two lines of the print music, and that is why I put in the numbers for the measures. Because at the top one you only have one, two, three, four, five measures. But it doesn't fit or it doesn't make sense to put all five on one line. And that's... where you are going to learn the more symbols you are learning, such as, you know, sharps, flats, naturals, staccato, accents, the longer the braille is going to become so we started out very simply and now we are going to longer representations. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] If we look at this one, there are only two things from the slide I want you to notice. What I want you to notice on the piano is that you have a new symbol at the beginning of the piece of music. You have the 4, 6, 3, 4, 5 and that is the right hand of the piano. Then you have the 4, 5, 6, 3, 4, 5 and that is it the left hand of the piano. Remember, when you were watching the video, he was reading it, and then he was reading it with his left hand. [ Slide end: ] I kind of want to show you a short video, now, that demonstrates how you have to read that as a braille user. This is a video from the Royal Academy in England. [ Video start ] Clair Galins: the printed music into braille manually. It is important that music is made available to everyone and this approach actually automates that process. Narrator: Clair Galins is a blind teacher of young musicians at the Royal College. Galins: How about we try to put some of the chords together? Student: Yeah, OK. Galins: You've got the vocal lines, so you've got the notes of the song, and you've also got, on a third line, you've got the chord symbols, which a guitar would pay. And Maya is a guitarist, so she's able to use everything in these Glee songs, apart perhaps, from the piano. [ Guitar music ] Narrator: Tomoko Endo, is a partially sighted pianist of great talent, a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Music. [ Piano music ] Tomoko Endo: I am passionate [ inaudible ] as well, so I was using large print for the most part; whereas, with music I was learning everything using auditory means. When I started braille music I was 13, and by then I had already been playing the piano for nine years. [ Piano music ] There was a huge gap between what I could read, and what could I play. It's not possible for us to read and play simultaneously. So, when I'm reading, I tend to do this -- where with the right hand... [ playing piano ] But... here comes another problem. Because in the left hand we have... [ playing piano ] But with it, there is a separate little sign that says there is something else going on here. And that they tell you with signs with the right hand. So I have to read the right hand and the left hand and then come figure out that it's not just... [ playing piano ] which would be easier for me, but instead it's... [ playing piano ] And then put it together with the right hand and get to...[ playing piano ] I need to read music, as well, so that I can interpret pieces on my own without the risk of copying somebody else's interpretation. [ Piano music ] You want to learn a piece of music but... [ Video end: ] Nichols: Okay, we're going to stop there. I just wanted to give you an example of having to read the piano music -- how you can read it with one hand, and you can play the right or the left hand, but until you read the full line of the left and the right together, she didn't notice there was a sign in there that changed how she played the right hand. You don't just pick it up, read it and play it. You have to interpret it. [ Slide start: ] So, I'm going to go on to the next slide... and I'm going to try to put it in full screen, and just for a minute, just to see if people can see it. These are a few dynamics. I didn't want to put them all down here. But those of you familiar with music will see quite a few crescendos and decrescendos and sometimes instead of seeing the hairpins, which are the long lines, you will see the C-r-e-s-c and D-e-c-r-e-s-c. They are the same thing, it's just however the person wrote it; wants it represented. So, you'll notice that they're different, as far as the braille. So as a braille user, I think you would prefer the hairpins because they are a shorter symbol. The reason there are two sets of braille notations showing there is, you need to know what note the crescendo starts on and what note it ends on; that way you quit playing with more emotion at that last note, where it's marked. And then down at the bottom you will see there are some of your pianissimo, mezzo forte, and those are simply -- I'll tell you right now that sign is representing that it is a word or a letter. So that's what's actually going on, is the sign, you will notice it just the letter after that. That the M-F, the M-P and the same if you see F-F. I will show this... in case you couldn't see it. But basically that is what is on the screen. And it's just a few of them. [ Slide start: ] [ Slide end: ] OK. I'm going to go to the next slide. And I think we will be okay but I might have used too much space. And I want to draw your attention to something. Those of you, hopefully who have the dots in front of you, you will notice that there's your beginning of the crescendo. And what the end of the crescendo is the same thing except it's dot 2 and 5 instead of 1 and 4. It should be represented here, and it is missing all together. So I worked with this from a book, and I have no way of correcting that. So I just kind of want to point out that there should be the ending crescendo marking here, because then you have the F-F, whatever it stands for. Sorry, can't say it too well. And then you have the octave sign. Remember the octave sign? That's the fourth, and you are just going to see those all the time. And here, you have once again, the symbol letting you know that it is a letter or a word and you have the F-F, and then you have something unique. Remember that the dropped -- the 2,3,6 was for your staccato and accents? You will notice here that there is a dot and then you have two symbols for the staccato and that means that the rest of the notes all have staccato, and so they give a symbol instead of having to put that in front of every note. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] This one should be okay. It is at the top. Here are examples of slurs, and once again they are much like the crescendos. They have to let you know there is a beginning and they have to let you know there is an end. Now, how they're different is, when you're using slurs, you're actually going to get the beginning of the slur before the note, that begins the slur, and you're going to get it before the end of it. Because it wants to, I don't know, tie those pieces together. I think that's the whole point of a slur and a tie. And so, looking at the piece, you will see, once again, there's the octave mark and then there is the beginning of your tie -- no, no, those are rests. I apologize, those are rests, don't pay attention... [ Laughing ] There's your... C. And there's your tie beginning, and then this one goes all the way over to the A. You will see another -- where it stops on that A. Does that make sense to you? And then, you will see it here, and then it stops after the B. You might notice there is a new symbol in front of the B, if you notice up on the print. That's a symbol for the natural B. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] I want to show you other things so I will just mention, -- okay, I challenge you to go through this piece and find the repeats and the brackets. [ Slide end: ] I will tell you that a repeat, generally a repeat can be used for a bracket, a measure, a series of notes that are the same. And you can even have multiple repeats. So if you're reading a sheet of music and it has one measure the same, then the next, then the next; you're going to have three lower case G's. You're going to have the measure and then you're going to have how many times it repeats with a lower G. And then there is the symbol for the repeating bar line whether it is on the left or the right. But, I think I'm going to cut that short and so we will go on. [ Slide start: ] I wanted to point out, and remind you, that this is how they should be starting the music. They should only be doing -- there you have the key signature, which is fine, you don't have to introduce it at first, but definitely just the notes. And this one has the note value, but at first would I simply do the eights, the upper cell, so that they can memorize those notes, start getting faster with them, and then you can add whether it is a quarter, half, whole. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] Chapter 4. Teacher Creation of Braille Music Okay. Teacher creation of braille music. [ Slide end: ] This is where I have done it all of these ways and... some of it is ugly and some of it is easier. [ Slide start: ] I have done a lot of training with the Goodfeel software, which I really like. It lets you take a complicated piece of music, scan it in, clean it up and then make it into braille music. However, the reason it is listed last on this list, is you are assuming when you use that software, [ Slide end: ] you are assuming that when you use Dancing Dots Goodfeel Suite, that the student has learned and practiced with all of the concepts that came before. You cannot scan a sheet of music, clean it up, hand it to the student and expect them to do anything with it. I've seen this happen and you know what they do? I have seen them sit on it, in the band room, because it means nothing to them if they haven't learned the skills that lead up to the whole score. So Goodfeel should be at the bottom. And probably for us, if we are the sighted teacher and we're creating this -- I do it with either Duxbury or Braille 2000 with a six-key entry. That's kind of nice to be able to do it that way. I don't generally use a Perkins braillewriter because I am not a natural braillist and I make too many errors. Sometimes I will use the Mountbatten braillewriter -- which by the way -- if you have the newest one, the bright blue one, it has music braille built into it. And if you want to learn more about that, give me call. But it has three different ways to use the music code within the Mountbatten Brailler. One is just simply playing a little tune. The other is letting you know what notes that you are inputting, and it gets -- it is pretty high level as far as what it does. Now, that is if the teacher is creating the braille score. [ Slide start: ] Goodfeel Suite, you should definitely have it if your student knows how to read braille music and they are in choir or in band, in say high school or upper middle school. It has three pieces of software. One is called SharpEye. It is a music OCR software. You scan a piece of music and it recognizes it and changes it into music. [ Slide end: ] Once again, it is important to remember, if any of you have tried to do -- represent mathematics in a word processor and then really think it's going to become Nemeth, it won't, because it's almost like Spanish, French, German; it is a different language. And so, even though it looks like text and it looks like, and it looks like graphical, you know, representations, it's a different language and so you have to with SharpEye take it from the pure print into music. Okay, and then you have the LimeAloud, which is an accessible music notation -- and I will talk about it more -- but that's where it puts it in to what you expect to see. And there are a few steps you have to do in there. You have to give it the tempo, the time; you have to make sure that it has the ending bars. So there are five steps you have to do before you dare send it to Goodfeel to get the Braille. Or it will just error, error, error. Goodfeel, you simply -- on the file menu from Lime, go down and it says launch Goodfeel. Once you launch Goodfeel you have several choices and I'll show that. But that's how you take the print notation and make it into Braille. Please do not be doing that first. Please be instructing them on how to read the braille music. [ Slide start: ] So, here's a picture of the SharpEye picture scan. The reason I call it a picture, if you notice, it's only on the bottom and that is simply the picture that it is taking of the piece of music. This is when it did its OCR, and down at the bottom is still the picture. On the top it becomes the music. And you'll notice on this that there are several things you can change. These will turn. You can add notes. You can change the values. You can make them triplets, which is took me forever to understand. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] Then you export to it LimeAloud, and this is what it looks like. It looks like what you would expect a sheet of music. If you'll notice there's that teeny tiny piano down at the bottom; I can't use that because I don't play keyboard, so what I did was I learned the shortcut keys that allowed me to move the notes and the octaves and allowed me to make them sharps, and quarters, and wholes. So, you don't have to use that little keyboard. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] Chapter 5. Student Creation of Braille Music Okay. This is LimeAloud to Goodfeel. [ Slide end: ] Oh, let me say one thing about LimeAloud. The student can open a LimeAloud and it will give them a choice, "What do you want to make this? Piano? Guitar?" And then it will ask them how many measures they want -- it doesn't matter, because you can add measures -- And then it will ask them what time they want it in, 4/4? 12/8? And then you hit OK, and it gives you blank staffs. Then the student can go in, and from a computer keyboard -- the home row computer keyboard is the fourth octave and you can simply insert notes and then with the number 1, 2, 3, 4, you can change it from quarter to whole to half, and with S to a sharp, and there's -- it's all embedded and it works with JAWS. It doesn't work with any other screen reader, simply JAWS, and what that does is, it allows the student -- remember music theory -- to write their own music and to be able to... then print it out for the teacher. They can put it in braille for themselves, but what they really want to do is be able to turn it into to the teacher, so they can print it out and turn it into the teacher. You can also use one of those pretty keyboards that plugs into the computer, a MIDI keyboard. But it's not like you're simply playing into it, there are still steps you have to do to change octaves, because the MIDI keyboard is not a full piano. [ Slide start: ] LimeAloud to Goodfeel. Basically, you can still see the LimeAloud in the background and you see the braille on the right-hand side. The reason you see the braille is because I pushed the button that said "Braille Editor." This button says "Embosser" and it would go straight to braille. But I typically choose Braille Editor because, what I like to do is, I then copy this entire braille and I put it into either Duxbury or Braille 2000, [ Slide end: ] because then if I want to write some instructions or some transcriber notes, some notes I want to put in it, I can six-key entry into it, because it is a braille file. And I can also take that braille file and use on it a Braille Note or Braille Sense or any of the braille note takers, and I have the braille right under my fingers. Likewise, when I am using Lime and I'm using the JAWS to write it, if I'm a student using JAWS, I can have a braille display, either my Braille Note or a different braille display hooked up and have the braille right under my fingers, so I'll know, "Oh, no, I didn't mean to do that!" And you can make corrections to the score at that point. [ Slide start: ] This is when I copied it from Goodfeel braille editor to Duxbury. And you see that basically it looks like what you would expect. Now, if you use that yellow bar to read it, it will look like a lot of your Microsoft Word copies, in that it has the ASCII. But this is how I manipulate it once I've got the braille music. And you'll notice, maybe on this score, it's got a title up at the top. I'm not going to read it. And then it has the composer or the person who... arranged it, and then it says it's a Soprano piece. And then you notice, down below that, it's in the 3/4 time and no sharps and no flats, before that, no key signature before that. So that is some of the things you should be looking for. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] And you should encourage the student to use the LimeAloud, and I know that we're going to be doing some training on that in the future. It is harder, because it is with students, so there is the logistics. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] I'd like to thank you and ask if you have any questions and the code for this is 120522. Once again, the code is 120522. And if anybody wants to look -- we have a few minutes if anybody has any questions, you're welcome to ask me. [ Slide end: ] Chapter 6. Questions & Online Resources One of the things I have on the handout are a few web pages. [ Slide start: ] So if nobody is asking questions, I'm just going to go through a few of them. This is one called B-R-L dot org. and it has the entire music code on it. And it is for sighted people because it has the dots. Now, this is N-L-S. [ Slide start: ] N-L-S has a huge collection of braille music scores, but once again, you have got to remember they are probably for the adults. Moderator: We have a question. Participant: At what age, which software programs [indiscernible] [ Slide end: ] Nichols: I'd probably -- it depends on -- he question was at what age do you introduce the Goodfeel or the LimeAloud? And that pretty much has to be on the student's ability to write braille music and read braille music. Generally, I have seen it maybe in the eighth or ninth grade, the introduction. But you really need to make sure they're competent at reading it, because it does give you every little symbol and nuance to the piece, which, if they haven't been taught how to do it, makes it kind of hard. [ Slide start: ] [ Music ] And here is a website like to show because this is a woman who shares her music. She is a teacher. [ some text ] She is a Certified Braille Transcriber, and she has some music there for you, some samples, and free transcriptions of guitar music; and below that it's called Happy Fingers. So it's some samples. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] And then there is this wonderful tutorial, called B-M-C tutorial. B-M-C dot B-R-A-N-C-H -- No, let's try that again. B-M-C dot B-R-A-N-C-H-A-B-L-E dot com. Branchable. B-M-C dot branchable. It is wonderful because it... is very easy. It starts off very simply, and it shows you a lot of those signs and then symbols. It is not the entire code. [ Slide end: ] [ Slide start: ] Then, most importantly, as we close up, this website [ braillesheetmusic.com ] is a volunteer website, much like Bookshare. It is free. You just have to sign up with your e-mail. But once you sign up, you can download braille scores. You can also even request braille scores from a volunteer. Anyway, thank you very much. I hope it was useful for you, [ Slide end: ] and I enjoy it. I encourage to you use the braille music code with your students and help them if they're going to study music further on. Thanks.