Feel the Forte

Inspiration

Music, despite being an auditory experience, is often rendered inaccessible for the visually impaired when it comes to digital technology that fails to consider their needs. Sheet music is purely visual, and thus interacting with it in a digital format is obscure and nearly impossible for those with screen readers or other tools.

What it does

Feel the Forte reads in images of sheet music and converts them into machine-readable files in real time, which allows that data to be interpreted and read by a screen reader, or converted into Braille music notation. Using existing optical music recognition and other algorithms, we would compile each of these into an easy-to-use program that visually impaired users can use universally!

What's next for Feel the Forte

.Feel the Forte is just the beginning of making music accessible. Our current prototype supports reading input from a computer screen and converting sheet music images into MusicXML output. However, music doesn't only come in the form of sheet music — digital audio workstations such as Logic and Ableton are nearly unusable for the visually impaired. Our biggest ambitions extend to creating simple APIs for DAW software makers and sheet music editors such as Musescore and Noteflight to incorporate into their software so that editing is directly possible through key presses and screen readers.

Built With

• figma