Crescendo: Haptic Exploration of Scores for Novice Musicians with Dyslexia

Music students with dyslexia often struggle with rhythm, matching pitch, and reading musical notation, problems that can continue as they develop expertise. In pedagogy, it is common to use multiple modalities to teach students with dyslexia to read musical notation. This paper introduces an augmented, multimodal score for novice music students with dyslexia called Crescendo. The program uses a computer running Processing and a pantograph-type device. The augmented score reinforces pitch and duration haptically and aurally as the user freely explores the score. Initial evaluation of the system with non-dyslexic users indicates it would likely be accepted by novices.