New "Instrument" - Human Voice saying the name of each Note

• Aug 8, 2017 - 20:58

As a teacher, I am loving musescore. -
My students are learning to read music, including intonation and rhythm. -
I have a question, though, as I was listening to some GPS while driving (ok, I don't drive, I cycle, but is good to have a story) and thinking about it:
Why not a new "instrument" for educational purposes, which would be human voices saying the name of the note. - I guess we could have then both male and female optional to insert for each taste, just like our GPS narrator.
Actually, this could be A B C D E F G to English/similar music notes countries and....
Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si to Italian, Spanish, i,e. Latin standard music notation.
This would be great for training intonation and practice to locate notes on staff, specially with different clefs...
I guess by 2017 we already have technology to have human voices saying the notes... Cars would agree with that (ok, I am not good with jokes, but still,,,)...
What do you think?

Comments

• Aug 8, 2017 - 22:51

It's a clever idea. Someone could indeed design a soundfont that does this. There wouldn't need to be any special support in MuseScore for this, really, except maybe for dealing with accidentals. That would be the trick, I guess - getting it to say C# versus Db according to which way you've chosen to spell the note.

FWIW, MuseScore does support the NVDA screenreader (and possibly others), which is a tool blind people use to ahev their computers speak to them. So you already can get MsueScore to read note names aloud. But I suspect you'll find it is too verbose, as it is trying to tell a blind person everything that is going on, not just the names of the pitches.

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• Aug 8, 2017 - 23:02

Thank you! Actually, as I am Brazilian, I am more familiar with Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si - Eastern Europe has the same names for the notes, and as I remember reading about it, composer Zoltan Kodaly came with the solution with additional vowels for each note depending if is flat or sharp. I think as I remember, Do# turns to be "Dae" (De) and Dob "Dee" (Di) ...

I just went quickly to wikipedia and found this:

"Another style of notation, rarely used in English, uses the suffix "is" to indicate a sharp and "es" (only "s" after A and E) for a flat, e.g., Fis for F♯, Ges for G♭, Es for E♭. This system first arose in Germany and is used in almost all European countries whose main language is not English, Greek, or a Romance language."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_note

Below the quote I've sent you have a nice Table for Names of notes in various languages and countries

I think with this information we have one more step to make this fabulous tool for musescore? It will be proudly musescore the pioneer of it!!

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