[musictlk] Music software

josh lester jlestermusic at gmail.com
Mon Mar 31 11:33:47 UTC 2014


For good synthesis, get the Mac and you can use Garageband!
Blessings, Joshua

On 3/31/14, Kenneth Downey <kenwdowney at me.com> wrote:
> I have noticed over the years that there is very little music software for
> the blind. Yes, we have sequencers like QWS and Sonar, and the Dancing Dots
> software for braille music, but there are some things I would really like to
> be able to do, and I'm wondering if any of you have ideas on this.
> 1. Synthesis. On one hand, VST hosts, at least the ones I know about, do
> everything graphically, so even though you   can load a soft synth like
> Hypersonic into memory, you're not likely to be able to do much with it
> except play the preassigned patches and soundscapes, unless you want to just
> experimentally click around with the mouse. A really good examlle, using
> Hypersonic 2, is modulation speed. While you can adjust a lot of variables
> with knobs, switches and buttons on a MIDI keyboard, you can't adjust the
> speed of vibrato, because it's generally not something assigned to a MIDI CC
> number. Audacity has a wonderful nongraphical interface for VST plugins, but
> to my knowledge it can not be used to play MIDI live.
> 2. Other programs, like Synth Edit, just aren't accessible, at least to my
> knowledge. While it's true that, through programs like CHUCK, sounds can be
> created through a C style -mand line language, and CSound which is similar,
> what I am really after is something like my old JD800. Yes, I could probably
> learn a whole new programming language and work  for hours to make sounds I
> used to be able to make in just a few minutes with my keyboard, but not
> everyone can learn programming, and personally I can think of much better
> uses of my time than to spend hours making a sound I may only use once or
> twice. It's high time that the blind community as a whole gets to experience
> what I did with my old JD 800.
> Next comes audio analysis. We can do a lot of this by ear, but our ers can't
> give us as much detail as we might like.  There are two types of analysis I
> know of. One type is amplitude analysis, and that's what sighted people see
> on the screen when examining wave forms. This type, while fascinating, would
> be more educational than necessary. It would be just as easy to listen for
> clicks and pops than to sonify a waveform and listen for abrupt changes in
> it. Nevertheless, I am working on such a sonifier if any of you are
> interested in hearing what these wave forms sound like. Frequency analysis,
> on the other hand, is very important, as it allows you to do everything from
> synthesizing complex sounds to finding frequencies that need to be filtered
> from a sound.
> So my question is, what accessible software do you know about? I'm running
> Windows Xp currently, but may get a Mac in future. I also have an iPhone,
> and have to say that the music apps on iOS that are accessible are
> astounding.
> Thanks in advance for all the feedback!
> '
>
> Good is the worst enemy of best.
> Ken
>
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