Designing a Haptic Tool to Help Visually-Impaired Musicians and Music Learners Learn/Read Musical Notes

With an historical point of view and with the bibliographic overview, the article discusses on the
idea on developing a haptic tool to help the blind and visually-impaired users to learn musical
notes from flat screen in example the computer screen. The current approach being used by the
blind and visually-impaired musicians to learn the musical notes is by using Braille-transcribed
musical scores or listening by ear. Since there is a number of problems that arose from the
techniques, therefore we came out with a prototype which helps the blind and visually-impaired
musicians and music learners to read and learn the musical notes without the need to depend
solely on the Braille-transcribed musical scores, by transcribing the musical scores into a
mechanically haptic tactile force feedback which can be sensed with the user touch sensation and
with the use of SensAble Onmi haptic device.
With the haptic device, musical notes on flat screens may be reinterpreted and presented
mechanically to the user's haptic senses (kinaesthetic and tactile), where ideally, they can feel
how the notes "looks", provided that users have a basic understanding on the types of notes and
the beats that associates to the notes. In developing the prototype of this project, we described
the hardware and supporting softwares which together reinterprets the conventional flat screen
musical notes into haptic, touch-sensable notes that will differ in many senses as compared to the
conventional flat screen musical notes.
The prototype has been developed based on critical requirements gathered and is implemented
by using the incremental and iterative, prototyping based development cycle which are further
refmed through extensive researches and data gathering processes. Based from the researches
and interview which has been done with the blind and visually-impaired musicians, it is proved
that there is a lack in the current approach of learning musical notes. Therefore, with the
implementation of the system, it is hoped that we can solve the problems that rose from the
current approach of learning music for the blind and visually-impaired musicians and music
learners. We expect that the haptic tool to help the blind to learn musical notes will become
standard tools that will encourage the blind users to learn and read musical notes from flat
screen.