Special skill of Visually Impaired Persons 10 – how do visually impaired children learning piano playing?

When we talk about famous music, what do you think of? Beethoven's Fur Elise, Mozart’s Turkish March or Liszt's La Campanella? Have you ever thought about how the people with visually impairment learn to play the piano? We will share with you some tips on how do visually impaired children learning piano playing.

The vision of each visually impaired child is different, so the method of learning is also different. Children with residual vision are able to read the scores with assistive equipment, such as magnifiers. In addition, they need to see where their fingers are placed in the appropriate key position closely, so they are not able to read the music book while playing the piano. They need to remember the songs before. For children with severe low vision or total blindness, since they are not able to read the music book, they will listen to the postscript first, and then try to remember and play the song. For example, the teacher plays a short paragraph first, the student will practice that short paragraph and then go to the next one. In addition, since they are not able to see the keys, they would use the touch of the hands and the distance of each key is recorded. They usually need more times to learn a song than others.

Last but not least, some visually impaired students will use braille music book, but it takes long production time and need to order from overseas. In brialle music book, different combination of brailles represent different content in the book, such as:  tempo, rhythm, music note and other theories. From the below examples, it is a difficult task to read the braille music book.