2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology

Seminars @ Hadley Braille Music Technology

Presented by Bill McCann

Moderated by Billy Brookshire

January 19, 2012

Billy Brookshire Welcome to seminars at Hadley. We are so glad you're here. A great presentation this morning. My name's Billy Brookshire. I'll be your moderator today and co-moderating with me is Shirley McCracken. You're going to hear from Shirley a little later on. Shirley, do you want to say hi to the folks?

Shirley McCracken Welcome to the seminar and good morning, everyone.

Billy Brookshire Your presenter today is Bill McCann. Let me tell you a little bit about Bill. Bill's the founder and president of Dancing Dots Braille Music Technology, the company that's been helping blind and low-vision musicians make music since 1992. His company created the world's first commercial Braille music translator software, GOODFEEL and creating what he calls accessible scores. Dancing Dots markets an access solution for creating professional-sounding multi-track audio productions.

Their latest product enables low-vision musicians to read and to write music in an accessible environment. He's been interviewed by the BBC, Associated Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer, published numerous articles about his work. In 2009, Mr. McCann was invited to speak about Braille music at UNESCO at a special dedicated conference in Paris dedicated to Braille's memory.

Ladies and gentlemen, help me welcome Mr. Bill McCann. Bill, it's all yours.

Bill McCann Good morning everybody and thank you, Billy. This is kind of fun. We have a lot of toys hooked up here and we'll be getting to some of that but I thought we'd start off, if you'd like Billy, with an interview portion if you

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 2 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology have any questions for me. Otherwise, I'll go to the option where I can basically hold down the control key and do a little bit of lecturing but before we get to that, did you want to start off with any particular questions for me?

Caller Hi Bill, it's Mike from Montreal.

Bill McCann Hello Mike. Good to hear you.

Caller It's good to have you here today. I don't have any questions so far right now and I'm curious to hear what you have to say today.

Bill McCann Well, it's fun to have one of our international customers here. Mike has been with us for many years and he's holding down the fort up there in Montreal and its fun to have you here, Mike, and I hope there's some other international customers tuned in today. Getting back to Billy Brookshire, Billy if you have any particular questions you want to lead with, I'm ready to go. Otherwise, I'll just go into lecture mode now. Just let me know where you want to go with that.

Billy Brookshire Bill, if you could tell a little about how you got into this biz and a little bit about your company and tell us about some of the folks that you work with. I know you work with some incredible folks. I know that's a lot to get started with but I'd love to hear you speak on those topics.

Bill McCann Okay, well I'm going to give you the three-minute version of it but as many of you know, I am a blind musician. I started playing trumpet when I was nine and even earlier than that, that's all I wanted to do was play music. It's fun stuff. To compress the history a bit, I ended up studying Braille music for a few months, then my teacher moved away and I was at the age of nine when I got my first trumpet. I went on to play in my local high school band. I was the only blind student in there.

I went on to study music at a conservatory in Philadelphia and always was waiting for some breakthrough in terms of getting Braille music. I had a difficult time getting Braille music in a timely way. I had the support of wonderful transcribers. They were volunteers, though, and sometimes I would send the print music off to them and sometimes, I'd get it back in time to learn it in time for the concert or the lesson and sometimes I wouldn't.

During that time, this would be the late 70's, I found out two things. There was a very smart guy I met named David Holiday, he went on to make Mega Dots, and David had made some software for the Apple 2E to turn mathematical equations and text into Braille. Meanwhile, lots of sighted friends were using computers to play or type in music notation and printing it out. I took those two facts and went to the next step, which was, "Well, when you do all these things, why can't we turn print music into Braille music?" I talked to David about it and talked to other people about it and everybody thought it was a fine idea but nobody ever did it.

Now, meantime, I left music school and got my degree, spent a year being a musician, played in every church and night club that would have me, taught some students, sold some music but in the end, after about a year of that, I said I needed to do something else and I went and studied programming at a program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where they were training people with all types of disabilities to program computers. I came out the other end of that having almost quit playing because it was such an intense course. I had literally not touched a computer until that time.

I came out the other end of it, took an internship at an oil company here called Sunoco, which some of you may have where ever you're listening from, and I was part of a group that maintained software for the payroll and benefits and it was a good job. I liked it but I didn't love it. I love music. I was always looking for a way to put the two things together. The thing that I actually loved was the thing I found the skill of programming that would actually pay a living wage.

By the end of 91, our company wanted to get smaller and they were offering a good compensation package if you raised your hand and volunteered to go and I thought, "Well, maybe I'm young enough to know what I want and old enough to do it," or something like that, so I talked about it with my wife, we were expecting child number two, we talked about, prayed about it, thought about it and we agonized but in the end, we went on and did it. I say "we" because if she hadn't supported me, I probably wouldn't be talking to you today.

That's a little bit about how I got to this point. Then, in 92, I started writing a prototype of what went on to be the GOODFEEL Braille Music Translator. I spent a couple of years part-time at this. I taught at the Overbrook School for the Blind part-time, taught in the international program, played a lot of gigs with my band, I was still an active musician part-time, I was

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 6 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology never a full-time musician and took some training contracts and taught people to use different kinds of assistive technology but in 94, we were blessed to win a competition to get a major grant from the U.S. Department of Education and through that I was able to hire Albert Maloney, who's still with me and Albert went on to be the main developer for what became GOODFEEL.

I wrote a lot of the code for the actual Braille music translation and we had a couple of other guys who came in and I think in the end there were five programmers that have contributed something to GOODFEEL, which is our Braille music translator. Today, GOODFEEL is in use in virtually every state in the union and we're up to 41 countries. It converts print music to Braille and later versions in the last few years allow me as a blind person to actually enter music and print it out.

We can print music out for sighted people to read. Then, while we released the first version of GOODFEEL of 97 and guess what? It was for DOS. We quickly got onto the Windows platform and we discovered a couple of things. The people who love Braille music loved GOODFEEL but as you may know, Billy, and some of your listeners probably know, not enough people read Braille so the Braille music readers were an even smaller minority.

However, a lot of blind people wanted to just make music and record music, music that they played just for fun or for school or for even to make part of their living.

We found a company called CakeWalk up in Boston, they're still up there, and their current product is called Sonar and it converts your computer into a recording studio. We made some scripts with a guy named Gordon Kent, he's done a lot of good work for me over the years, made some scripts that we did and then we connected with a talented musician and programmer, David Pinto, out in Southern California and David, kind of on a parallel track, made some scripts and some tutorials for teaching blind people to use Sonar with the Jaws Screen Reader.

We connected with David and we became his worldwide distributor for what we ended up calling CakeTalking, which is a pun because it takes CakeWalk and makes it talk. Anyway, I'm going to let up for just a second. I want to make sure everybody is hearing me and just hold off on this control key here and just tell me how we're doing.

Billy Brookshire It sounds like everybody's hearing you okay, Bill. I've got the message from several people that they hear you loud and clear. Audio quality is excellent. I've

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 8 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology had one message early on that the audio was a little low but it looks like that's pretty much been taken care of. Sounds wonderful, keep it going.

Bill McCann Okay, I'm going to forge ahead. Anyway, yes, through David Pinto, we started distributing CakeTalking, which comes with a four five hundred page tutorial of info on how to use Sonar to make recordings with your computer and that product is in dozens of countries, too, and all over the U.S. and a little later, I'd like to give you a taste of some of the things that people have been recording with it. As that progressed, I met different people over the years and just some of the fun we had with Ray Charles. I met a lady at a conference, a French lady, who said she knew Ray and put me in touch with people there and anyway, I said, "Well, I've got to get David in touch with Ray," because they both live in Southern California.

Long story short, David and Ray had some sessions and I think it was 2003; I had planned to do a low-key event in the evening, reserve a room, bring in a bar and some musical instruments and have a little jam session. It went from that to hiring security people and stamping people's hands because Ray said he'd like to come and show people what he could do. He did. To his credit, he did a great job and he didn't

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 9 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology charge us a nickel. We did buy him a lot of champagne but he asked Stevie Wonder to come and lots of other people came, too.

The fun part was he sat down and showed us how he had learned to play music and print out the parts and when he scored something out of simple ideas, he scored it out very quickly, thirty two measures of a blues pattern for four saxophones. David and I had hired some local session players in L.A. and they sounded great and we brought them in. They had been outside so they didn't know what to expect. We put the music on their guides and Ray brought his bass player and we had a drummer there and Ray said, "Now, if I made mistakes, play them. One, two, three," and he just counted it off and the guys just read it straight down from top to bottom and it sounded wonderful.

It was a very exciting moment for a lot of reasons but just the fact that a lot of blind musicians have lived and died wanting to do what he just did. Those of you who do compose and who are blind, you know what I know that you have these ideas in your mind and you just want to get them on paper and you want to hear back what you composed and up until our technology, it's been very challenging to do that in a timely way and a cost-effective way.

That was big fun. Yeah, we've connected with different celebrity people over the years. Ronnie Milsap's been very supportive. I don't know if he uses our recording solution himself but he's been very supportive and vocal about telling people about us. I've had the pleasure to meet Stevie Wonder at different times over the years and show him what we're doing and again, he himself doesn't use it but he's very supportive and tells people about it and he's very encouraging to us.

There are a number of people who use the technology themselves, though. Dianna Sure has been one to make demos with Sonar, there's a wonderful jazz musician, Marcus Roberts, and if you haven't heard of him yet, check him out. Marcus uses our Sonar solution and also the GOODFEEL solution. I'm probably forgetting somebody. These are some people you may not have heard of but are just doing great work. I'll get to some of those a little bit later.

Anyway, getting back to my own history, just a few years ago, after many years of going to shows and people saying, "Hey, what do you have for low-vision people?" and I'd say, "Well, we're going to have to work on that." We finally do have something. It's a product we call the LimeLighter and it's a combination of hardware and software that magnifies music up to ten times and you can scroll the music with a pedal so

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 11 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology you never have to turn a page and that product is launching maybe not as quick as I'd like but the good news is we're in the eleventh stage and I think four European countries now with that product.

By the way, all this stuff now or later, check out DancingDots.com. There's a link from the homepage called Presentation. You can stream some presentation, some audio and video things, there's a link directly to the LimeLighter, it's under "T", and if you're using a screen reader and you want to look down the links. There's lots of stuff and propaganda there but I don't want to talk too much more without getting to the fun stuff. Time is flying by but Billy, if you have any other questions before we get to the show and tell, I'm going to let up and you can let me know what you want to do from here.

Billy Brookshire Bill, I think you covered everything very well. I'd just go ahead and get on with it. We had a couple of questions from folks in the audience but I'll save those until after you've had a chance to present. Go for it, partner.

Bill McCann Okay, great. Bear with me for just a second and we'll set up here. What I want to do is quickly just give you a taste of how some of this stuff works. I'm going to

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 12 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology my desktop and launch Lime, which is a great speech program. Lime is one of the programs that come with GOODFEEL. GOODFEEL, in fact, is a suite of software that includes GOODFEEL, a Braille music translator we developed here at Dancing Dots, some scripts we developed to work with a program called Lime that I just launched. Lime itself is a notation editing program that we did not develop. It was developed by the University of Illinois and last but not least, a program called Sharp Eye Music Reader, which you can use to scan and print music, play it back and convert it into a format that we can use in Lime.

I'm going to load one of our test files. To those of us in the U.S., this is a familiar tune. It's a patriotic song. It's also a patriotic song in the U.K. but it's called "God Save the Queen" over there. Now I've loaded the music to "My Country 'Tis of Thee". I had the music. By the way, this notation file was created by a sighted guy who does not know Braille music. I'm going to describe what we have here. On the screen we have the music and conventional staff notation. It's five lines and this funny looking round ovals or whatever they are.

We have the Braille music on my Braille display and we have Jaws loaded with our scripts so when I press the right arrow key, you heard the F and the speech

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 13 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology said, "F four-quarter". That means the pitch is F and it's in the fourth octave. In Braille music, we have octaves, not clefts, and it's a quarter note. That's the duration of it. I can arrow through this note by note.

I'm seeing the Braille music on my Braille display because we've integrated Lime with GOODFEEL. We have the print and we have the Braille. We have the speech and the musical queues to type together. You can go through note by note. I can arrow down, here's the alto part, and it's the second voice in the right hand. Now if I want to hear the alto and the soprano together, I'm just using the standard cursor keys to do these operations.

I can do down to the base line, there's the tenor, there's bass and tenor together and if I want to hear everybody together, I can hold down a different series of keys. I love Braille music and it's a wonderful tool but one of the things that makes it challenging is, and those of you who may know something about it, is it reads right to left and if you have a right hand and a left hand, the rule is you align the first note of each measure vertically but if the left hand has two notes and the right hand has eight notes, they're not lined up the way they are in print so that you can just glance down from the top to the bottom and see the entire harmonic structure.

With this aid, we're able to exploit the advantages of speech and the advantages of what Lime offers as a notation program to be able to go through chord by chord and get the sense of how this thing works. The cool thing is yeah, you can scan music in and get it into Lime, you can play it in as the friend of mine who created this file, and he played them in with a musical keyboard you can attach. You can also import notation that's created in other notation programs through the magic of a new format called Music XML and they're free plug-ins to programs like Finale and Survelius that you can get that will allow you to take those files and import it into Lime.

We're going to import Music XML. A while back, I got a call from a band director in a place called Atlanta, Texas and he said, "I have a blind student who plays euphonium and I want to get him his Braille scores but I paid my dues and I know how to use Finale and I want to learn this Lime thing," and I said, "Okay, well, you make the file in Finale and send me the Music XML and we'll take it from there." This is one of the ones he sent me, it's from St. Nicholas. I'm just importing that now into Lime.

The note density, which is how it looks on the page, I don't really care about that. There it is. It's all in there; I didn't have to scan it, I didn't have to type it in, it's all right there from the file that he sent me and

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 15 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology again, I can go through note by note. We can play it back in tempo until we get to the euphonium part, so it's a bit boring, but the point is, it's there.

That's cool. The other thing we can do if you can't scan it and you can't import it, you can just create it. Okay, so I'm in a new dialogue. How many measures do I want for my new piece? I'll say two. I can set the time and the number of measures per line. I'm just going to take all of those. Just for fun, I'm going to make it for clarinet. I'm going to come up with a sound that's sort of like a clarinet.

Now I can just type in some notes. I'm going to do that. I'm going to put this in. We're going to make it two laps. Okay, now we're going to go into note entry mode and I'm going to enter a couple quarter notes. The cool thing is I just typed in those notes to imprint on my screen. They're in Braille on my Braille display and you can hear them as I play them. Let's play it back in tempo. There it is.

I can print that out now and give it to the sighted clarinet player and say, "Here's your part." It didn't take too long. Not like back 30 years ago when I was in school when I used to grab a sighted classmate and say, "Could you write this music down for me, please? The first note, second line, is G quarter. The second note is F-sharp," it was very tedious.

That's a little taste of that. I'm going to close that and just ask, before I get on to a few little projects that people have made using Sonar, which I'd like to share with you, I just want to make sure that I'm coming over okay and that nobody has any burning questions. I'll come back here and go into this menu.

Billy Brookshire Bill, we've got several questions. It looks like there's several folks who would like to ask some things about microphones so I'll release this pretty quickly, but we've got a lot that are coming in on the chat room. I think you responded to some of them already but there are lots of specific kinds of things. One person wants to know if you are entering your notes on a musical or a computer keyboard, which is pretty interesting. One other person asked if CakeTalking will work as well with Windows as with DOS.

Bill McCann Due to the questions, I was typing the notes in from the standard PC keyboard but there is an option to connect a USB musical keyboard and you can play notes, and even more than one note at a time, as in a chord, so that's not a problem. The scripts that we developed are based on Jaws, the CakeTalking scripts. Some customers use Sonar with Windows but I don't personally so I can't really comment but I've

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 17 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology been told that the basic functions work pretty well but some of the more advanced editing functions do not. I can't really comment any further. There are people, we have an online listener called DDotsL, and our people on that list have a lot more experience with using Windows than I do so you might want to drop a post there and just see what they have to tell you.

Billy Brookshire We got another question coming in, Bill. I'm going to go ahead and pass those on to you. One person asked early on if Dancing Dots was making scripts for the new Sonar EX1 and I know you just mentioned that briefly. Somebody else was curious about how many pages for a song comparing print to Braille. How many pages does one song contain if you translate it into Braille? I don't know if there's a good way to answer that but I'll leave you with those questions.

Bill McCann Okay, the X1 version of Sonar has been out for some time and to date, we have no scripts for it. Unfortunately, the guys who make Sonar, the people at CakeWalk, broke a tradition that was over 10 years of basically working with us and we had some beta testers for them but this version, they decided to rewrite their user interface, which basically means that they broke a lot of the accessibility that David

Pinto had built up over the years. We're still trying to recover from that. We can sell the former version, 8.5, which is the good news.

Aside from one or two features, the X1, the big difference is that it looks really cool to people but as far as functions in Sonar; you're not really missing a whole lot by not running X1. In the meantime, David Pinto's taking a look at trying to make it work. He has not committed to saying he can make it work. We may be at the end of an era but I have confidence that if David looks at it and thinks he can do it, it can be done. He's quite a wonderful programmer and very tenacious but in fairness to him, they've really changed a lot of things and made it look very glitzy and not to get too technical but a lot of things are broken.

We will probably make an announcement in the next couple of months of where we're going to go with that. I wish I could give you better news on that but I really can't. In the meantime, though, if you're interested in using this technology and you want to jump in, you might want to order Sonar 8.5 from us while supplies last, as they say. That's kind of where we are at this moment in time.

I might take one or two more questions but I want to get to some of the audio samples that I have just to

Billy Brookshire There are quite a few more but I'm going to center on one here. Duncan is asking a couple of questions so I'm going to bring this one forward, Bill. Duncan says he's a blind musician in his 60's and uses a computer. He also has read Braille music but finds it cumbersome. Would Dancing Dots be a benefit to him in getting piano scores transcribed?

Bill McCann Well, I'd have to say that I think so. As you observed there, once the music's in the computer, you can read it in Braille music on your Braille display or, and I didn't demonstrate this, you can pass it directly and bring GOODFEEL into the foreground, hit the emboss button and make a hard copy of the Braille score. The cool thing is you can go back and read your score while you're listening to the music in tempo. You can slow that tempo way down and you can use Lime as a learning tool to listen to it at a slow practice tempo while you read the music and memorize it.

You can use it to go through it note by note or by chord and analyze how that chord looks. What are the notes to this chord? What's in the bass? What's in the treble? I'd have to say that Duncan may want

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 20 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology to give me an email. You can contact us, there's a contact link on DancingDots.com or you can just email directly [email protected]. We offer a 15- day trial version, a fully-functional trial version of GOODFEEL Suite and we'll even make an appointment with you to help you evaluate it. We'll sit on Skype or on the telephone with you and connect and using Jaws Tandem and just see if it works for you.

It's worked for a lot of people but as they say, "One size doesn't fit all." It may or may or may not work for Duncan but I'd be happy to help him check it out.

Billy Brookshire Got another question that Thomas has been trying to get across here. He was saying, "Does the system recognize read-articulation marking? Will it tell the user to slur the following notes or some other indicator?"

Bill McCann Yes, it will. In fact, why don't I go back into broadcast mode? I'll go back and show you just a taste of that and then I'm going to get to some of the audios of stuff so bear with me. Now we're back broadcasting with Jaws and I'm going to go back to that Lime file. The question was about articulation. Let's put a staccato mark on that note and let's slur this note to

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 21 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology the next note. We'll put an accent on this note. The nice thing is, all these articulations are appearing immediately in print and in Braille and you can hear the speech describe them. I hope that addresses the question.

I am going to close the line in the interest of time. We have man decades of work here and we're trying to present it in a very short time. There's a lot more to it, let me just say, and if you're really interested in trying it for your own work, just give us a call or email us and we'll work it out with you.

I want to close, basically, with some examples of Sonar. As I mentioned, we have people using this recording software that we made accessible through the CakeTalking scripts and tutorial all over the world but one of the guys who's been with us for way back when is a talented musician and producer from Coldwater, Michigan and his name is Greg Braden. Right before I went up there, I went up to Greg's site and he has a link up there, www.GBraden.com, and he has a "What's New?" link so I downloaded his "What's New?" project and it's just kind of fun so just keep in mind that Greg is a blind musician. He uses our stuff and he produced this track you're going to get a taste of independently using the technology and of course, using a lot of God-given talent but you know, he didn't have to sit there and ask a sighted

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 22 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology guy, "Hey, what's the level look like on that track?" or "How much reverb is on there?" He's a guitar wizard, by the way.

There he is in all his glory. It sounded good. I'm going to come back here and tell you about one of the many international customers and projects that we've been able to hear about with people using this stuff. All different types of styles and music. This one is a group of very talented blind musicians from Trinidad. I had the pleasure of going down to Trinidad in 2005. I mentioned that I taught at Overbrook School for the Blind and one of my colleagues there was a man name Ansil and Ansil put together a foundation and he's doing some great work down there getting access for blind musicians and just blind people in general. He has a heart for music and so here's a little taste of a project they're working on. They're going to put together an album as a fundraiser. This one's called "Soft Waterfall".

Here's a beautiful rendition of a traditional hymn "How Great Thou Art". A guy named Camden Isaac, again a Trinidadian blind musician. Let's get a little bit of this.

Beautiful stuff. I mentioned earlier that I've had a long association with talented blind musician, producer, composer, arranger, my friend Gordon Kent, and

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 23 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology about six years ago, I went down to Birmingham, Alabama to attend and exhibit the American Council of the Blind convention and they had a showcase and we put together a band really quick and I taught them one of my tunes and it went fine for the live audience but when Gordon got back to his studio to make the CD version that a friend in our group uses as a fundraiser vehicle, there were a couple of things that he didn't like and he couldn't get rid of so he decided to just keep the trumpet track, which I was playing over a not-so-great PA system there and build a whole studio track around my song. I'll give you a taste of what happened. He had to put a lot of reverb on the horn because as I said, the local sound system wasn't so great, but just remember, he took a live recording, isolated the trumpet and then played my arrangement but he played and added all the other sounds synthetically and put this together. This is my song called "My People". Here we go.

There's a little taste of that. While I was listening to that, I was thinking about a couple of other really wonderful blind musicians who I failed to mention earlier who are using our stuff. One is a piano wizard from New Orleans, Henry Butler, who you may have heard some of his stuff and if you haven't check him out. A guy named Raul Medune, who is an up-and- coming recording artist in his own right who actually made a little video clip of himself using Sonar and

CakeTalking in his own studio. I would have been remiss to forget those two wonderful guys and I'm sorry if I'm forgetting anyone else because we just have a lot of people around the world using our stuff. Some of them you've heard of them, many of them you haven't, but as you heard from some of the clips there, there are a lot of talented people out there and I'm sure a lot of talented people listening to me who would like to get their stuff out of their head and into a recorded format or onto a printed page, onto a Braille page.

The bottom line is if you're interested in that, it's DancingDots.com where you can find us and find out about that. I can't really demonstrate the low-vision product here in the medium we've chosen but there are some videos you can look at online. Another guy I'd like to mention briefly, who's been with us for a long time is Richard Tashe. Richard has authored a number of courses on how to read Braille music and we publish his courses and we use them. We do a lot of online training here in Braille music.

Just another person to acknowledge, in loving memory, is Betty Krolic. Betty passed away last year but I call her the Fairy Godmother of Braille Music and she was always very encouraging to us. She put together the team that made the first international Braille code that's standardized, that's Braille music,

1997 and she did a lot of other wonderful work. Anyway, with that, I'm going to try to turn it over. I know the clock is ticking.

Billy Brookshire Thank you, Bill that was incredibly soulful. Thank you for sharing that. That was absolutely wonderful. We do have some more questions and there's I for sure want to get out there but I also want to give a little time to Ruth Rosen and Linn Sorge who are here with us today. For those of you listening, Hadley is about to put the Braille music course back up, folks. It's coming very soon. Ruth Rosen is designing that course and Linn Sorge will be the teacher and Linn, Ruth, either of you guys want to talk a little bit about the upcoming course and then I'll ask Bill a couple of more questions?

Ruth Rosen Hello everybody and thanks for all the wonderful ideas and technology and options that musicians who are blind and low-vision can use. Very quickly, we will have two new courses. One is for those who are Braille readers and read some music or sing and want to learn how to read music in Braille. The other is for sighted individuals who are considering learning about transcribing or teaching and they already print music and they also know uncontracted Braille and

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 26 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology would like to get an overview or a short course about learning to do those two things and of course, at Hadley, you have an instructor and you work one-on- one with the instructor as I'm sure many of you already know. Linn, do you want to state just a few words about the advantages of using Braille music? I'll let go here.

Linn Sorge Greetings, all. I've been a music reader since I was age six and I smiled when our presenter said he remembered in college saying, "Treble clef, second line in G-quarter to third line, B and A." That's exactly how I got through my music degree because that's what we had and it was more than thirty years ago. Hopefully, we're going to touch on lots of folks. We're going to touch on you who would just love to be able to read your choir music and memorize it and work on it independently or if you have a youngster, either as a student or who is your youngster and you know his music teacher, then you could encourage that short course which would say, "Please don't just let the students play by ear and not learn to read."

It's such a joy to be able to read your own music and create your own music so keep looking in Hadley Connections, EConnect, and when the course is ready to roll, we'll be ready to welcome you and we

Billy Brookshire Coming soon, folks, stay tuned. It's going to be a great course. It's got a great instructor and a great designer. Thanks, you guys. Before, Bill, I get back to some questions, I have a note here from Debra Bloom, who's vice president of development and communications for Hadley, and what she wanted to know, folks, was why you folks tuned in today? Why did you choose to participate in a seminar on Braille music technology and if you wouldn't mind, any of those who would like to answer that, just give your answers in the chat room and answer them in text.

I thank you for that. Bill, a couple of questions here. One came up a couple of times and I think we need to get it out there and that's about guitars. Let me see if I can get the question exactly right. It says, "Is there a way a guitar player can transcribe tabs?" There were a couple of people; I believe it was Alex and Bryce, who were interested in that.

Bill McCann Well, there are two sides to that. The nice thing is if you play or type information into Lime, it has an option to just immediately convert it into print or tab. We don't have an automated way to get from there to

Braille tablature, but another customer of ours, a recording artist and friend from the U.K. has developed his own system for tab and there are a few official and unofficial Braille tab systems but I believe Matt has figured out a way to get some of that stuff automated. I'm not up exactly on where that stands but again, you could go in and use the tab in Lime if you want to get some stuff of your own in print tab to give to people to strum along with.

I should mention quickly, too, that our translator for Braille can not only do the music, it can do the words. If you have a song and you need the words done to music and it has its own translator for English built in. It can also do uncontracted Braille in other languages. We can do stuff like the title and who wrote the song and stuff like that. It's self contained. We don't pretend that our translator as sophisticated as Ducks Berry but it works pretty well and generally it gets the job done for lyrics, titles and so forth.

Okay, so I'll jump off and listen for another question or comment.

Billy Brookshire Okay, Bill, as you know, our time is long since over but there were another couple of questions that I wanted to throw out there that people wanted to ask and open the microphone for a little bit so maybe go

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 29 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology to 11:15 or so if that's okay with you. The question that Carla that I wanted to send your way. One is she wants to know if Braille music has special dots indicating tempos and so on and she also asked if she could have the CakeTalking demos to give it a try.

Bill McCann Okay, well, the first question, generally speaking, Braille music is a very well-defined code that covers pretty much anything you're going to see on the printed page and what we might call traditional or conventional Western music notation. That includes tempo, indications, metronomic markings or whatever. The trivia question to the audience, just think to yourself, do you know who invented Braille music? A lot of people don't know that Louie Braille invented Braille music. He was an organist, a cellist, he loved music and he wanted to be able to read music. When he publishes his system in 1829, it was called the System for Blind People to Read Text, Arithmetic and Music so music was with us right from the start.

As far as CakeTalking, I would say go to DancingDots.com. There's a link that says "CakeTalking" and on that page, you can download a presentation made for us recently that gives you an overview, pretty detailed, of what Sonar can do. We do not have an actual demo of that for a lot of

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 30 of 33 2012-01-19-Braille Music Technology technical reasons. We can't offer that but you can go and listen and probably the first 20 minutes of his 90 minute presentation will give you a good overview of what the software does and how it works and how it sounds when you use it with Jaws.

Billy Brookshire Thanks, Bill. Our time is almost gone. I've got time for maybe one or two questions by the microphone, folks. Anybody got a pressing question they need to know the answer to? Bill, it looks like you've done your due, my friend. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. I appreciate you taking the time to share with us and so I guess if everybody's content, I'm going to go ahead and bring our seminar to an end. Boy, I hate it.

I want you to know, folks, that this seminar, like all of our seminars, is archived on our website. You can access them by where it says "Access Past Seminars" on the opening web page so by all means, get in there and check them out. If you want to listen more to this, it'll be up for you to check out. Shirley, any particular Hadley courses or webinars that you might want to mention?

Shirley McCracken One of the webinars that people might be interested in tuning into would be Ted Hull and the Wonder

Years seminar. I think people might enjoy that along with this one and of course, keep in mind that Hadley will be having the regular music course being offered soon.

Billy Brookshire Thanks, Shirley. Well, folks, thanks for participating with us today. As you know, we value your feedback so let us know what you thought about the seminar and suggest future seminar topics and you can do that by sending an email to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. We'd love to hear what you have to say. Bill, I'm going to give the microphone back to you for any final comments.

Bill McCann Thank you, Billy. First of all, I want to thank you and all the people at Hadley for inviting me to come and share a little bit about what we've been working for the last 20 years. It's fun to just slow down a minute and do that. I'll just say thanks to everybody again for being part of the session and obviously I'm happy to hear from any of you anytime and just bear in mind please that we have a small company, just a few of us, and so sometimes we don't get to the phone but that's why we have a voicemail system. Just leave us a message, we'll get back to you or send us an email.

A couple of things quickly, just to let you know. We're going to have a booth at the ATIA Conference in Orlando next week. If anybody's down there, we're going to be doing a presentation on the Lime software on the 28th at the Braille Institute of American in Los Angeles. Contact the people there, I'm sure they'd love to have you, but you do need to register in advance for that one. We'll be at the conference in San Diego, which runs from the 29th of February through the 3rd of March. We'd love to see you there in San Diego. With that, I'll say goodbye and happy music making. Bye for now.

Billy Brookshire Thank you, Bill that was absolutely wonderful. We enjoyed your presentation today. I know everybody else did, too, from reading their comments here in the chat room. Again, thanks for doing this. Thanks everybody else for coming. We're glad you joined this. Take care of yourself, my friends. Bye bye.

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