Weasel: A System for the Non-visual Presentation of Music Notation

A computer-based approach to the delivery of music notation for blind people is described. Existing non-visual alternatives present musical information in a serial fashion which places a high cognitive demand upon the reader who, in effect, must read all the information regardless of its significance to any particular learning task. The Weasel notation system has been designed to address this problem using interactive high-level tactile representations, synthetic speech and audio playback. 1. Common music notation and non-visual alternatives Common music notation (CMN) is the most widely accepted method for presenting music in both educational and professional settings. The main strength of CMN lies in its graphical nature where the reader can visually process great quantities of information simultaneously. Using this graphical approach, a music reader can ‘sort’ the musical data with considerable ease. The way in which a musician of any level chooses to approach an unfamiliar piece of music for the first time is highly individual. A particularly able music reader can be capable of sight-reading the majority of musical notes, symbols and textual instructions whilst simultaneously producing a performance based on that information. In contrast, a less confident reader will work only with information that is useful within a given task. For example, learning the order of pitches or durational values, concentrating on instrument specific technique such as fingering, bowing and picking or perhaps focusing on dynamic changes within an extract. Filtering out the information which is not significant to a learning task is a simple visual task when using CMN. Although CMN is without doubt a very powerful and flexible system of music notation, the fact that it so visually dominated means that blind musicians and music learners cannot use it at all; instead, they must rely on non-visual alternatives. With existing non-visual approaches, such as braille music and Talking Scores, there are compromises to be made. Either all the information within the original CMN will be translated producing large quantities of serial instructions or some of the information will need to be removed with a potentially high cost in terms of loss of performance accuracy. Although the latter might be acceptable during the early stages of learning and might even facilitate basic structural outline to be included, as with Ockelford’s suggested adaptation of braille music [6], in the long-term this could not provide the basis for serious musical study. In addition, there would also need to be many different editions of each piece depending on the nature of the learning task in hand.