On September 4th, 2015, seven young and enthusiastic music students gathered together at our Homai Campus to spend a day learning how to use the new and exciting Braille Music Editor computer programme. In figure 1 the students and staff are seated around tables with their equipment, learning how to use BME.
Braille Music Editor allows students to write music in braille, listen to what they are writing, and at the same time feel the score in braille under their fingers! This is the first time our students have been able to independently write music in braille using this new technology, instead of having to navigate around a print score on the screen. Given that composition plays a key role in high school music programmes here in New Zealand, this is an important step forward for our students, allowing them to independently compose and then email their work to their teacher, who can open the file as print music.
Students learnt how to set up a new music score, input and edit their music, navigate through the score, listen back for confirmation, and share their score with their peers both as braille files, audio files, and print scores. The day was a huge success and it was fantastic to see the students so excited about writing music and using music braille.
Here is what some of them had to say:
“This will get me inspired to compose more which will mean that other people can hear my music”.
“The highlight for me is that I don’t need to rely on someone else to write the music as I can write and edit this by myself”.
“BME is going to help me with NCEA because I’m not going to be having to set up the braille paper, worry about making a mistake and not being able to fix it. Now I’ll be able to delete the mistake and make it look a whole lot better”.
In figure 2 Renee & William are reading their BME tutorial and working independently on their compositions.
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