UKAAF

UKAAF is an industry association which is setting standards and promoting best practice for quality accessible information based on user needs, enabling businesses and organisations to deliver a quality service to meet the needs of people with print impairments. www.ukaaf.org

Music Subject Area

The Music Subject Area examines and makes recommendations for the production of music notation in both hard copy and electronically, covering braille music, Modified Stave Notation, large print music and Talking Scores.

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An introduction to Talking Scores and an invitation to join the Talking Score discussions

Do you (or someone you know) enjoy making music, but have a sight difficulty or dyslexia which makes it difficult for you to read music? Talking Scores might provide an answer.

The options

For blind or partially sighted musicians unable, or no longer able, to read standard stave notation, there are currently three advertised options: Braille music, enlarged or modified print notation (known as Modified Stave Notation (MSN) in the UK) and Talking Scores. The latter two options are also helpful to musicians with dyslexia. For ease of reference, the term "print disabilities" is used from here on.

These three choices are very different. To use braille music effectively usually requires the ability to read literary Braille fluently first. Enlarged notation or MSN are merely reformatting of regular stave notation but require stable vision. Talking Scores is the only choice based entirely in sound.

What is a Talking Score?

A Talking Score is a spoken version of a stave notation score which often incorporates the music in sound, either produced electronically or played live. Until now, the majority of talking scores have been produced manually as one-off, tailor-made versions.

The system is still experimental, and there are still no agreed standards. However, over recent years some people have produced Talking Scores on a do-it-yourself basis, largely for their own use. They have had to decide their own working practices according to their own preferences.

Our current aims

There will always be variation in how users prefer their Talking Scores to be presented. This might depend on a range of factors, not least user's previous way of learning music. Initially, we want to encourage people who would find Talking Scores useful now to produce their own home-made versions, alongside those who are already using Talking Scores sharing their methods.

A second aim is to create a community of Talking Scores users and producers to share experiences and ways of working who can trial and inform any protocols and minimum standards that are proposed.

Future developments

Within this flexibility, our long-term aim is to develop a protocol for Talking Scores with agreed rules and minimum standards, such as there already are for other alternative formats such as Braille music and MSN, making more scores readily accessible to all users. We aim to ensure that these protocols and minimum standards are based on the experiences of users.

In future we want to explore the use of computer solutions.

Screen readers can provide access to an electronic score produced in music notation packages. This allows scores to be explored and navigated whilst altering the amount that is spoken and the order in which information is given. This potentially turns any score in these packages into Talking Scores.

We also aim to draw on research in Europe which under a project known as Contrapunctus produced the Braille Music Reader which allowed scores to be navigated and read in Braille, heard in sound and read as a talking score. The speech had five levels of complexity. This work is now being furthered in the Music4Vip project (see www.music4vip.org).

Get involved

We should like to encourage discussion and promote awareness of Talking Scores.

You may already use or produce Talking Scores or perhaps you would like to try them or you know somebody who would benefit from trying them. Give your contact details and say if you have any experience of Talking Scores already (in which case, please tell us briefly about this).

We are producing guidance notes containing hints and ideas for producing Talking Scores. We will send this to those who contact us. It would be helpful if all who contact us could say if they would like us to keep their details on our data base so that we can keep them informed of any future developments in Talking Scores.

Contact James Risdon, RNIB Music Officer by email to or by telephone on 020 7391 2273.

A personal experience of Talking Scores

Finally, Jeanette Crookes offers an account of her own experiences developing Talking Scores. We hope it will be of encouragement to others.

"I learned to play the piano to a moderate standard in my youth. As an adult, I enjoyed playing mainly for my own pleasure, but by the early 1990s my sight was disappearing very fast and reading musical notation had become extremely difficult. I did not play by ear or from memory, so it seemed my playing days would soon be over.

I contacted the RNIB for advice, and this was that I should learn Braille music. I worked through the tutor book which they supplied and by the end of it was able to play a very simple children's piece by Walter Carroll. There was no follow-on tutor book, and it was apparent that it would take long, long years that I did not have, before I would be able to play the sort of pieces I had previously been used to.

My next step was to contact the RNIB again to enquire whether there was any solution using audio-cassette tapes which were then in wide general use. I was told tapes were not used for musical notation, but it was suggested they should be, and that I should think about how an audio version of notation might work. I see that as the germ which began Talking Scores for me. Simon Labbett, then Music Officer of RNIB, contacted me, and during the few years that followed, Simon and I explored ways of conveying notation on tape. Simon produced pioneer tapes of a couple of pieces, and it was a treat to learn from them. I quickly surprised myself by finding that it was not so difficult after all to memorise, so I do not believe an initial inability to memorise need deter would-be users of Talking Scores. Simon went on to formalise the conventions we had arrived at, and a few more tapes were produced by RNIB at their transcription centre in Ivybridge.

In the late 1990s RNIB discontinued this work, and for a time I had no way at all of learning music. Then in July 2004 my piano was tuned by Malcolm Haswell. That was a fortunate day. Over a cup of coffee I explained my difficulty in accessing notation, and Malcolm said he would like to work with me on it. Nine years later he is still doing this, and has produced countless tapes for me.

Talking Scores have given me much pleasure over the years, very much thanks to Simon and Malcolm and I have found Struggling to learn a new piece a very satisfying way to spend a long winter evening!"

TS001 August 2013