Making Braille Music Universally Accessible
By CORDIS, the Community Research and Development Information Service for Science, Research and Development,Publication Date: January 21, 2010
Article features Contrapunctus, a standardized digital technology for transcribing music into Braille and making musical scores for blind readers universally available. Contrapunctus encodes all aspects of a musical score using a software package called RESONARE. The resulting Braille Music Markup Language, BMML, reorganizes written music into a highly structured, easily searchable database. Blind musicians can read any BMML score in a program called the Braille Music Reader (BMR). BMR can describe musical elements from individual notes to changes in tempo or dynamics in spoken form. It also lets the musician add notations such as fingerings and breath marks to the score. Users with access to a computerized Braille display can read any part of the enriched score by touch. Contrapunctus has also created an online portal as an access point to a Braille score library, compiling contributions from European libraries for the blind. More information is available at the Contrapunctus website, http://www.punctus.org/.
Published by: Publications Office of the European Communities (Website:http://publications.europa.eu/index_en.htm)
Link to text: http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults//index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&ID=91118
