A Celebration of Sound and Song: Music Tech Shines the Spotlight on Musicians with Vision Loss

<p class="p1">This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss.</p> <p class="p1">Marcus Roberts, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and even Louis Braille (who invented the Braille Music Notation system still used today) prove that musicians who are blind or visually impaired have made profound impacts on our musical landscape. However, to get their work to us, musicians who are blind have had to structure complex workarounds, like relying on sighted musicians to demonstrate complex scores; memorizing long pieces; or only performing when they can have a Braille score in front of them, shutting them out from opportunities that fall to those who can sight read, since Braille scores have often been time-consuming and expensive to produce. However, new technologies in music composition and production are making composition, nuanced scoring, and Braille printing easier than ever, bringing musicians and composers who are blind to centerstage to share their sound and song.</p> <p class="p2"> </p> <p class="p1"><strong>The Big Takeaways:</strong></p> <ul class="ul1"> <li class="li1"><strong>“Lullay and<span class= "Apple-converted-space"> </span> Lament” by James Risdon.</strong> The recorder — pivotal in music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods — only lately has emerged from a long period of obsolescence. James Risdon, a passionate player who lost his vision due to Leiber’s congenital amaurosis as a child, has written the original song for recorder “Lullay and Lament” for his album <em>Echoes of Arcadia,</em> which marries the early recorder with contemporary recorder music. To make this album, he relied on new musical technologies like Dancing Dots.</li> <li class="li1"><strong>Dancing Dots with Bill McCann. </strong>Bill McCann is the founder and president of Dancing Dots Braille Music Notation software. Dancing Dots is a suite of software — plus educational resources and training — that helps people who are blind to read, write and record their music. McCann founded