Music Braille

Hello,

In this opportunity I am going to share with you some information about Braille music, because my thesis project for my graduate studies is about teaching Braille music to blind children in my country, because there are almost non professors nor schools dedicated to this matter there: 

Braille music system uses the same symbols used on literary Braille created by Louis Braille. This allows to notate music using Braille cells so that it can be read by blind musicians.

Braille music system, as literary Braille, is based on the use of six dots to configure one letter, abbreviation, or symbol.

This is a picture of the position of the six dots:

Almost all the music that exists can be translated to Braille music notation, because Braille notation is a very complete system that has its own rules and symbols that enables to describe all the music information found on the original notation.

Both systems of music notation, even though very different from each other, are equally difficult to learn. In my opinion, it is more on the execution where the difficulty on Braille music it’s bigger.

Here I leave an example from literary Braille made by myself, especially for you:

(It means: Hi EXPANDERS!)

This information is of public domain, and the first picture I used it was taken from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille_music

The Pandeiro!

The Pandeiro it is originally from Arabia. It came to Europe in the times of the Crusades, known in English as tambourine. It suffered different local adaptations, depending on the place and people that used it; some are more square or round, some are made out of wood and other have metal, etc.

The Pandeiro, which is the Brazilian version of the tambourine, was developed for the Choro and Samba during the 20th century, and it was handmade. But the luthier that created the Pandeiro as we know it today was Miguel Fasanelli.

The technique developed on Brazil for the execution of the Pandeiro it is by far one of the best examples on how an instrument can be completely adopted by a foreign culture, bringing an endless number of new and wonderful different characteristics on the performance, technique and confection.

La Negra Tomasa says...

Here it is an example of a musical piece executed by the group “vocal sampling”; this song is titled “La negra Tomasa”, you can tell that this piece is executed only with human voice, even the percussion instruments are simulated with the voice. Following this example, I want to share this reflection:

In its most primitive beginnings it is estimated that the music was exclusively vocal, without the utilization of any instruments. Until now it has not been possible to determined if primitive singing was born out of the necessity to communicate from large distances or if it was born out of the necessity of using a different intonation to communicate with their gods; to say a pray or to thank them. As we all know, all instruments at their beginning had an strictly vocal behavior (some even doubled the voice), but with the passing of centuries, musical instruments were slowly acquiring a bigger protagonism thanks to the sophisticated techniques developed throughout the years. Nowadays, the sophistication level in the confection of the musical instruments is total.

So, after all the above mentioned, I think it is at least a bit ironic that in this era, we are thinking that the voice should be the one imitating the instruments, when in fact since the beginnings of music it has always been the other way around.