Support for visually impaired people: Utter the notes and chords
Best regards to you all and thank you for a very good program. I use it myself and I use it on my Linux machine and it works perfect. Well, almost perfect since there is this little loading window that stays opened simultaneously while the program is started. But nevertheless, it's not a problem and everything works quite good.
Anyway, I came with a question, not for myself, but for my brother in law who is a visually impaired person, who plays the accordion and who has a big problem with reading the notes and chords. He simply needs to have a software which will utter the notes while he plays the instrument.
I have tried to look for such a plug in. I am also ready to develop the plugin myself, since I am a computer programmer but before I do it, I would kindly ask any of you here to provide me with an information if such an option or plugin maybe already exists, that I am not aware of?
Thank you all in advance!
Best regards,
Edo
Comments
We do have Screen Reader Support in MuseScore, see https://musescore.org/en/handbook/accessibility
In reply to We do have Screen Reader by Jojo-Schmitz
And yes, you are right. In that sense there is a Screen Reader Support. But I am asking myself of something else that has nothing to do with a Screen Reader. Something which would be practical for those who are not musical experts such as my brother in law, for example :)
To play the song in Music Score is not a problem. There is a space bar to toggle start/stop and left/right cursors to go back and forward and it works for him quite good. The catch is to have a SOUND "saying" for example D, C, F, A etc...
When a person who is able to see learns the song, an eyesight is used to READ the notes and hands are free to play the instrument. When a blind person does the same thing, one hand is supposed to be used for reading the notes so there is the problem. Two hands can not be used.
If a software could play the song and utter C, D, C, H... etc when needed, a visually impaired person could hear NAMES of the notes and simultaneously have both hands free for learning the song.
Is there such a plugin/option maybe already?
In reply to And yes, you are right. In by Edo Schatz
No, there is no such plugin, and I don't think the plugin framework would allow to create one for this.
In reply to No, there is no such plugin, by Jojo-Schmitz
Thank you for a very fast answer. :)
To bad there isn't such an option. There is always a solution to parse a music XML and to make such a "player" but it would have been much more convenient to have it in Muse Score.
Thanks anyway,
Best regards
In reply to Thank you for a very fast by Edo Schatz
In MuseScore you still have Screen Reader Support ;-)
And there is a notenames plugin, to spell out the names, as staff text.
Maybe using a bigger font might help? Not for a bilnd of course, but for someone with bad eyesight?
In reply to In MuseScore you still have by Jojo-Schmitz
Hmm... maybe a combination of NVDA and notenames plugin could work. I will give it a try and let you know.
Thanks for a good idea, danke schön! :)
If someone recorded themself saying/singing the note names and turned it into a SoundFont then it would work in all programs, not just MuseScore. Perhaps someone has already done this, but I couldn't find one when I did a quick search just now. The only slight problem would be differentiating between equivalent sharps and flats, but that's not really a bit deal since they have the same fingerings on most instruments.
In reply to If someone recorded themself by shoogle
That's true. That would be a solution in this case. I was thinking of developing some small application that would, based on musical XML data, read and utter prerecorded sounds. But I would much more like to see this feature in Muse Score. Maybe it could be also good for those who are just about to learn notes, and maybe even for visually unimpaired people who just want some more automation while they do they first steps in playing.
I have been googling such a software but also with no success. But if I don't find it, I will develop it myself as soon as I find some time for such a project. There are millions of visually impaired people and most of them are very close to music. Many of them have music as a very important part of their lives. To do anything to help just one person to have an easier way to learn to play some instrument... well, I think it's worth of some trouble.
I wish I could develop such a plug in for Music Score. I really like this program a lot.
In reply to That's true. That would be a by Edo Schatz
I've been thinking about this all day and I think I might give it a go. We could work on it together if you are interested. I have some recording equipment that should be good enough for a first run. I can record the raw files and then we edit them together to turn them into a SoundFont. The first run would just be me speaking the note names (i.e. "C", "C sharp", "D flat", "D", etc). Once we know what we are doing in terms of converting the raw files into a SoundFont then we can turn it into something more fancy later, like getting volunteers to sing the note names at pitch, or using solfège (do, re, mi,), or MIDI pitch numbers.
Some coding will be required to correctly distinguish between sharps and flats, and I think that ultimately this should be built into MuseScore as a accessibility option. However, a plugin might work well as an intermediate step on the way to full integration.
In reply to I've been thinking about this by shoogle
Sounds like a job for the speech synthesis system built into Windows.
There are various languages available.
All that would be required is a text file with the note names in it possibly spelt phonetically so the speech synthesis system would say it correctly.
The Narrator app supplied with Windows 10 reads text for you as you type it.
I believe there is a Windows API which can be used to access this system on Windows machines.
In reply to Sounds like a job for the by ChurchOrganist
That would be great for Windows, but it would be nice to make it platform independent if possible. Unfortunately it doesn't look like there is a platform independent speech synthesiser, but I would love to be corrected on this point. Another solution might be to create cues for a screen reader program, though I have no idea how one would go about doing this.
In reply to That would be great for by shoogle
Qt, the application framework MuseScore is based on, will come with a QtSpeech package in one of the future version. It will give access to the native speech synthesizer on each platform http://wiki.qt.io/QtSpeech
Festival and http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ are open source text to speech software that can run on mac, windows and linux.
A possible solution currently would be to hook MuseScore to Jack MIDI, then create a client for Jack midi that read the midi event and call a text to speech synth or just trigger the reading of audio files containing note names.
In reply to Qt, the application framework by [DELETED] 5
> "or just trigger the reading of audio files containing note names."
So we're basically back to the SoundFont idea ;)
Seriously though, it's good to hear platform independent speech synthesis is on the way!
In reply to > "or just trigger the by shoogle
Not really a soundfont... Imagine a C E G chord and how a soundfont renders it. Now imagine how you would want it to be uttered. It's different.