Luca Gatta is a bright, talkative ten year-old who is taking a little while to settle down to his lesson. It’s a scenario most piano teachers will find familiar.

His teacher, Abi Baker, has a busy practice and performance schedule of her own but today is totally focussed on Luca and a new piece, Tangolita. "We’ve just done that sign, remember? It means 'staccato'," she tells Luca, and demonstrates on the piano.

What sets this apart from a usual piano lesson is that both pupil and teacher are blind, while the composer of the piece, Christopher Norton (the author of Microjazz), is here to learn about Braille music. Luca shows us the Braille Note, a digital notebook with a Braille display. Earlier, a Braille version of Tangolita was emailed and downloaded to the Braille Note. I am here as the developer of the application they’re using, the Prima Vista Braille Music System...

Luca, Abi and Chris are among the first signatories of Feel the Music™, the Campaign for Braille Music. Launched by my company, Prima Vista Braille Music Services, the campaign’s objective is simple: to bring the production and distribution of Braille music into the 21st century.

When Louis Braille’s bicentenary is celebrated in 2009, he will be remembered as the inventor of the 6-dot raised code that enables blind people to read by touch. But Louis Braille was also an organist who invented the Braille music code.  

Producing Braille music was a painstaking process, but then, in the days of engraving, so was the production of printed music. While engraving has given way to software like Sibelius and sheet music distribution is boosted by download sites, the production and distribution of Braille music has altered very little in the past 200 years.  Applications exist that can speed up the process but these still require multiple steps, and there remains a culture of transcription on demand. This is done by charities, volunteers or paid individual transcribers, often manually, using a Braille typewriter.

Today, the increased availability of printed music creates an accessibility gap between sighted and blind pupils, a gap further widened by the development of visual multimedia formats in the teaching of music. Though it’s wonderful to engage children in music through software that not only goes squeak-pop-splat but does it with plenty of onscreen colour and action, this ‘visual-centric’ approach further marginalises visually-impaired children from the one subject which, until recently, was relatively accessible.

Back to Tangolita, and Chris’s Braille music lesson is progressing well. He’s learned that Braille music is not simply a bumpy representation of print notation’s pitch-against-time graph, but a linear code. The basic unit of Braille is the cell, two parallel vertical lines of 3 dots each. Variations of these six dots can represent all the elements of a print score – notes, text, dynamics, accents and everything else – by adhering to a strict order of precedence. Every symbol has its place relative to the note. In this sense, Braille music provides a much more precise system than standard notation where the beginning of a crescendo, for instance, can sometimes be ambiguous.

So how did I become interested in this arcane musical language?

It was 2002 and I had been working for about eight years as a freelance notator trading as Prima Vista Music, preparing composers’ manuscripts for publication. I worked on operas, concertos, guitar tab scores, tutors and Chris’s MicroJazz series.  It was an exciting time in music publishing, with score-writing software still young. A few years earlier, I would crank up my Acorn computer, run Sibelius 7 and marvel that I could extract parts from an orchestral score in mere minutes. Sibelius and I grew up together and, with some experience in programming, I became interested in writing plug-ins (the geek equivalent of customising your VW camper). These home-made mini-programs do the jobs that might be too specialised to include in the main application. If a publisher wanted to soup up their version of Sibelius with, say, a database management tool, I obliged.

At about the same time, a new toy came on the market: the mobile phone. ‘Ringtone’ entered the dictionary, though ‘downloadable ringtone’ was yet to come, and those of us with the patience to spend an hour doggedly pushing buttons could produce our very own ringtones. Wise Publications, at Music Sales, were quick to spot a trend and produced a small book called Ringtone Mania consisting of ‘over 200 cool musical ringtones!’, from Stayin’ Alive to Theme from Cello Concerto by Edward Elgar. Instructions were depicted as a linear series of dots; each had been painstakingly figured out by arranger Lucy Holliday.

Intriguingly, these little recipes required only four pieces of information:  Note, Sharp, Duration and Octave. Ringtone Mania was hugely popular and when a second volume was proposed, I wondered if I could write a plug-in that would distil a Sibelius score into those four elements.   

I found that this was possible but while my own interest in ringtones passed, the idea of representing a graphic score in a linear code remained fascinating: there had to be some useful application for this. Ringtone Mania was page after page of rows of dots, and it was that image that led me to Braille; that, and a personal interest in visual accessibility issues. As a child, I had a severe degree of visual impairment that was corrected by surgery. As an adult, I sing in a choir, and play the cello in a symphony orchestra and in a string quartet. Life without notes would be a bleak prospect.

What started as a casual what-if became something of a monomania. I eventually put all other work aside in order to concentrate on creating a piece of software that could, in one step, translate a Sibelius file into Braille. I also tackled the other half of the equation and began to develop software that would enable a blind musician to create scores in both Braille and print. Another innovation of the Prima Vista system is the ‘Interface Score’ format, which adds printed Braille symbols above the notes of a standard score to help sighted people, such as school music teachers, to learn to read Braille music alongside a blind pupil.

I travelled to conferences abroad, spoke about my work and listened to blind musicians and Braille music experts. Five years down the road, Prima Vista Music became Prima Vista Braille Music Services. That I’d chosen ‘First Sight’ as my original trading name now seems a strange coincidence. I’m ready for a pilot project, and Abi and Luca are ready for me.

So what would it take to bring Braille music into the 21st century? And how would supporting Feel the Music™ make this happen?

There are three stages in the life cycle of a printed score: the manuscript, the digital score and the print publication. Manuscripts might be saved for posterity but what happens to the digital scores? The answer is, not a lot. Yet these could be used to produce a Braille version at no extra cost to the publisher. Additionally, this Braille score would be in a digital format that can be emailed, downloaded and saved to a Braille note-taker (like Luca’s Braille Note), creating a portable music library.

But to change the provision of Braille music from ‘transcription on demand’ to 'transcription at source' is to change not only the volume of available scores but the ways in which Braille music-readers learn and work.  

Imagine a five year-old who is learning to read. She’s given books at school but she also chooses books by browsing in shops or in the library. At home, there are magazines, books and newspapers she can try to decipher if they attract her interest. Her school books may be prescribed but her real motivation to learn to read comes from having easily accessible and varied reading material around her.

So choice and browsability are the first two improvements Feel the Music™ wants to promote. The next task is to debunk some of the myths about blind musicians getting by through ‘amazing memories’ or ‘incredible ears’. Elvira Haeussler, RNIB’s Post-Compulsory Education and Training Officer for Yorkshire, Humberside and the North East, is blind, reads Braille music and is passionate about singing.

"I know this sounds like a cliché, but I do have a good memory" developed, Elvira explains, because she’s unable to write herself quick reminders. Is this useful in her singing? Yes and no. The downside is learning from recordings when Braille scores aren’t available. "Whether you like it or not, you have someone else’s interpretation in your head."  And as for incredible ears? Elvira has developed the skill of picking up her neighbour’s note so quickly that it seems simultaneous. "But we do a lot of contemporary music and I come out of rehearsal with a strained voice because I can’t anticipate where the music’s going."

Luca and Abi both have perfect pitch and excellent memories so learning by ear is relatively easy for them. "But," says Luca, "I can’t see where the fingers go and things like that. And the Braille music has the accurate notes. In my head, I might change them over time."

For Marilyn Baker, a retired oboe teacher who is blind, having the Braille score was essential, especially when teaching sighted pupils. "How else could I judge the accuracy of the performance as interpreted from the score?"

What about the difficulty of learning to read Braille music? Luca’s been learning Braille music for about four months. "Because we’ve been taking it in really tiny steps, he seems to be taking it in really well", says Abi, whose teaching is funded by the Amber Trust, a charity enabling blind and partially sighted children to have access to music.

Yes, learning to read Braille music is hard, but so is learning to read print music.  And, like sighted musicians, not every blind musician will want to learn to read music.

The key issue here is having the option to learn if you want to. Chris’s innovative new graded piano series, American Popular Piano, published by Novus Via Music in North America, will be made available in Braille. This is the first example of a composer and publisher maximising their digital files by allowing them to be transcribed into Braille at source, rather than waiting for individual requests. A blind child embarking on this series will know that they won’t have to wait for the next piece as they progress, and it looks like Chris’s other publishers will follow suit.

The more supporters we have for Feel the Music™, the easier it will be to show publishers that there is a genuine need for Braille music, and that they can help by making their digital scores available for transcription. Composers, publishers, blind musicians, special needs professionals and the parents and teachers of blind children are all adding their names to support the campaign.

James Risdon, RNIB's Music Officer, comments, "RNIB is in favour of anything that produces more Braille music. Using electronic files, with due consideration for DRM and copyright issues, is a 21st century solution."

Prima Vista’s pilot project continues with the launch of a fully accessible website this autumn where embossed scores will be available, with digital score downloads to follow. Meanwhile, I’m still adding refinements, debugging and enhancing the software so that one day the application itself can be marketed.  Future plans include designing an e-learning programme and the further development of the Interface concept for sighted teachers. Most of all, I’d like to think that, before long, children like Luca will be browsing online for the music they want, carrying it around with them in an electronic format and having it under their fingers whenever they need it.