Blindness and FLOSS music-making

Discuss how to promote using FLOSS to make music.

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Basslint
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Re: Blindness and FLOSS music-making

Post by Basslint »

Hello,

what is the best solution for showing automation to a blind person?
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jeanette_c
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Re: Blindness and FLOSS music-making

Post by jeanette_c »

Basslint wrote: Sat Jun 26, 2021 11:06 am Hello,

what is the best solution for showing automation to a blind person?
I have no idea! :)
OK, are you talking about continuous automation? As an overview this is just as hard as showing a waveform, I think. You could first of all indicate that there is an automation, you could - on demand - show a current value. An event list can be utilised, though it isn't very intuitive or overly helpful if there are many events, i.e. lots of movement. Still, I suppose with good navigation features it might do the trick.
I will ask a friend who uses a few of the commercial solutions that do allow automation to see what other systems have currently in place. Though it'll have to wait a little, since there's a certain sports event on. :(
--
distro: ArchLinux, DAW: Nama, MIDI sequencer: Midish
All my latest music on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMS4rf ... 7jhC1Jnv7g
Albums, patches and Csound on http://juliencoder.de
Basslint
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Re: Blindness and FLOSS music-making

Post by Basslint »

Yes @jeanette_c I am talking about continuous automation. I guess you could spell the individual values at each second but it doesn't really give the big picture.

One solution I thought is playing it tonally. Basically, the automation is mapped to a continuous pitch generator. You can "listen" to an automation and it plays that waveform as a pitch sweep. So, for example, you would hear an upward slope automation as a "riser".
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jeanette_c
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Re: Blindness and FLOSS music-making

Post by jeanette_c »

First, I have talked to my friend. Apparently, neither ProTools nor Logic offer a representation of automation. In only one of the two basic editing of automations is possible without sight, but it is truly blind editing as such.
As to representing an automation by audio, this is a route taken by a few plugins. A special EBU metre comes to mind. For a reasonable reflection of actual values you should establish a pitch range. When I wrote a small EBU metre with audio feedback in Csound, I also allowed for different subranges, i.e. low to medium, headroom range to be kept clear, critical/clipped range. This does not exactly translate to general automation, but you could perhaps translate the idea. To signal those subranges I used a different waveform. i.e. sine for the low-medium range, square or triangle for the uncritical high range and sawtooth for the critical value range.
Another design question is: will you have a continuous tone or "beeps" in a predefined or customiseable intervals. You could even consider using intervals between beeps to further indicate values.
So much for presentation in audio. Current values in text for a given point in time are helpful for precision work and possibly relating the heard tone to actual values.
For actual editing and navigation purposes, a few more ideas spring to mind. Show or jump to next change. This can be helpful in a situation where you have stretches of static values. Something comparable to the audio "jump to next transient".
Another interesting feature could be: find next inflexion point, i.e. where the movement changes from going up to going down and vice versa.
If all this is within a plugin and not a host, the best you could do for these is just show the times for these events of interest, I suppose.
If you further have full control over the automation lanes themselgves, naming them is a good feature. Either automatically like "Cutoff automation" or "blend automation" or give the user the chance to name the lanes.
I hope this isn't too much more than you bargained for. :) Feel free to ask for clarification or anything else.
Best wishes, Jeanette
--
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Basslint
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Re: Blindness and FLOSS music-making

Post by Basslint »

Thanks @jeanette_c! It's a lot of info but it's good. I am thinking more about host-based solutions because it's unlikely that most plugins will adopt them, it's easier to think about DAWs.

One problem which I think affects all users is the lack of a standardized interchange format for automations. If it existed, one would not have to think about DAW-specific solutions and everything would be easier to conceptualize.

Actually, a standard format for sessions (for which I opened a different thread) would be the even better because you could simply implement all these things we discussed as command-line tools which operate on simple files.

Anyway, this has given me a lot to think about. Thank you a lot for the insights!
The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. [Acts 4:32]

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jeanette_c
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Re: Blindness and FLOSS music-making

Post by jeanette_c »

Hello @Basslint , here's one thought, and no more than a speculative thought at that. Many applications these days appear to support Lua as a means to customise functionalities or interface with specialised hard - and software. Perhaps that could be a way forward. DAWs still are very different in their structures and mechanisms, but perhaps a few core elements could be combiend in a "core library" that could be interfaced with the DAW specific mechanisms. Such interfacing will probably still be hard enough, but perhaps it's one way...
One major issue that seems likely is the actual audio output. Perhaps a multi format plugin could deal with that? That said my knowledge of DAW programming and internal handling of plugins, accessing plugin ports is nil.
As for commandline tools: as much as I love them and they will work on Linux with some kind of screenreader, they are not very accessible on other OSes and I'm not even really sure how well they'd work in a terminal application on the desktop using Orca on Linux. Alas, as far as I know, DAWs are not (very) accessible on Linux, this certainly includdes Ardour and Reaper. Not sure about Bitwig.
As an aside: I heard that there is a tool called hardour, a sinmple commandline interface, currently geared towards loading existing sessions without the GUI overhead to be controlled live by external means, hard- or software using OSC, MIDI or MCU or whatever else there is. I must confess general curiosity to that development. :)
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All my latest music on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMS4rf ... 7jhC1Jnv7g
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Basslint
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Re: Blindness and FLOSS music-making

Post by Basslint »

Actually this is a very good idea @jeanette_c - instead of rewriting stuff from scratch, leveraging an existing complete DAW!

I think offloading to OSC most things it can deal with is also the way to go. It's better than MIDI, uses URLs instead of obscure messages and can communicate with a lot of hardware.

I will look into the Ardour Lua API more in the future, to see if there is room for making it accessible to blind users. Thanks :D
The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. [Acts 4:32]

Please donate time (even bug reports) or money to libre software 🎁

Jam on openSUSE + GeekosDAW!
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