NEW SOFTWARE FOR MUSICAL SCORES.
Accessible Music, a software tool for blind and vision-impaired people
that produces spoken and Braille scores from scanned sheet music in
seven languages, is to be launched at the end of the year by FNB
Netherlands, a Dutch state-subsidised accessible library.
The software allows users to hear the contents of an entire book of musical scores, saving what can amount to months of waiting time to obtain accessible sheet music. Users track detail down to individual bars and notes, playing fragments or accessing detailed spoken descriptions.
"Everything that's on the page of a music score is represented on talking music," a spokesperson from FNB Netherlands said.
The tool uses the structure of the international DAISY standard for e-
books (
http://www.daisy.org
It will be marketed to amateur and
professional musicians, composers, teachers, librarians, publishers,
software engineers and technologists through the FNB web site
A free demonstration CD of Accessible Music will be available from
the end of
October - email
projects@fnb.nl
. And a free email newsletter on
accessible music is available from the FNB Talking Music project site:
http://projects.fnb.nl/Talking%20Music
Updated on ... November 22, 2006