[duxuser] Re: Music Braille
- From: "William R. McCann" <BillList1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <duxuser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 00:50:57 -0400
Dear Victoria,
As you told us that you yourself are a music braillist, it may be that you
are not primarily interested in our GOODFEEL Braille Music Translator which
automates the transcription of many types of braille music formats. Our
typical user is someone who is charged with producing braille music scores
who knows how to read printed music but may or may not know anything about
literary or music braille and cannot learn to be a music transcriber.
However, some braille music transcribers have begun to recognize the
potential of our software for increasing their overall productivity.
GOODFEEL's speedy transcription of common music materials such as choral,
band and orchestra parts, beginner to intermediate piano pieces and even
orchestral scores can complement your own manual transcription work. Combine
all of that with our forthcoming optional integration with Duxbury (see
below) to facilitate transcription of books with large blocks of text
interspersed with musical examples, and you have something which we believe
will be useful to many transcribers.
GOODFEEL comes with a licensed version of the SharpEye Music Reader which is
Optical Character Recognition for printed music notation. It also comes with
the Lime notation editor.
You might consider using GOODFEEL to create the formatted braille music file
which you can then proof, applying your expertise to determine if you wish
to edit GOODFEEL's output. Generally, GOODFEEL gets a perfect score for
content and page format but there are rare cases when you might want to
insert or delete a space, a dot 3 separator character or a superfluous music
hyphen. We know that the vast majority of these bugs do not hinder our users
from getting the details of their scores but we also are working hard to
correct them as we definitely appreciate the value of formatting standards.
But while we are constantly working to improve GOODFEEL, people can get the
information they need in a much more timely manner by using our software
than usually occurs when the music must be sent to a transcriber off-site.
As you well know, there just aren't enough people like you who have
developed the specialized skill of music transcription.
Anyway, combining your specialized skill with GOODFEEL's automated speed and
accuracy should accomplish two things. First, you will speed up production
of common music materials for your clients and thereby (second) gain more
time for yourself to apply your skills to the manual transcription of
materials which are not yet appropriate for GOODFEEL such as opera libretti,
large orchestral scores, etc.
BTW, GOODFEEL has Transcription Options which you can customize for North
America, United Kingdom or other international settings. If you are based in
the U.K., as I'm guessing, you can receive a free demo CD from our
distributor, Techno-Vision Systems (see
<outbind://21/www.techno-vision.co.uk> www.techno-vision.co.uk or E-mail to
info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx for details).
As Mr. Bell pointed out, GOODFEEL will work with other screen readers than
JAWS. It is very important to understand though, that the SharpEye music
scanning software is far from completely accessible to a blind person
working independently. I myself use JAWS. I can scan a piece of printed
music but, if SharpEye reports even one scanning "Rhythm Error", I cannot
independently use SharpEye's very graphical user interface to correct those
rhythm errors. I need to recruit a sighted person who knows something about
staff notation and the meaning and function of common print musical symbols
to correct those errors for me before I can continue with the transcription
process.
With the release of GOODFEEL 3.0, we will offer an optional integration
feature with Duxbury's DBT for Windows. It will be possible to embed
references to music files in the Lime and MIDI format within your Duxbury
print document. At translation time (CONTROL+T) Duxbury will call the dll
version of GOODFEEL each time it encounters a reference to a music file.
GOODFEEL will return the formatted music braille for the musical passages
and Duxbury will insert that text in the appropriate place in the music
theory or method book being transcribed. This feature will be very handy for
anyone who has tried to paste formatted braille music into a Duxbury braille
file from a third-party source. If you've ever tried that, you know the
problems which arise with page-breaks, etc.
I hope this explanation has been helpful to you and others. I'd be happy to
continue correspondence on or off-list.
Regards,
Bill McCann
Founder and President
Dancing Dots
and Proud Distributor of the Duxbury Braille Translator
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