Thomas J. West Music

Today, I read a blog entry entitled Unseen Music on the J.W. Pepper blog. It describes the fascinating story of The Ohio State School for the Blind's marching band program.

While their story in itself is quite interesting, what caught my attention was their use of current music technology. Lime is a music notation software program developed at the University of Illinois that specializes in creating a music filetype that can be passed to another software application called Goodfeel, which turns the notation into braille sheet music. The parent company of these programs also has software for blind musicians to interface with Cakewalk Sonar and an application to scan sheet music and convert it to braille.

The OSSB marching band uses this software in conjunction with SmartMusic to give the blind musicians the tools they need to both read and hear their parts to the band scores in order to practice their part.'

We live in the future, my friends. What a fantastic oppotunity for these young musicians. The current technology gives them access to more music and the ability to practice it as never before.

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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