Musical Vision

While I was talking with my friends, I got a striking question, “I know it is not a realistic question, but what if you ever have to choose to become either blind or deaf, what would you choose to be?” After a long thought, I answered “I hope I would never get to choose from either, but if I ever have to choose, then I think I would rather be deaf than blind. Because I am a very visual person that sense of seeing is so important to me.” And later I got a shock at my friend’s answer. She said, “I would rather be blind than deaf because I can solely focus on who the person really is by his/her saying than by the appearance of the impression.” Her answer brought me the thought of how I usually put the visual aspect in prior to any other values. And we further discussed how applications we are using daily basis are also well designed for blinds with a good sound interface without any difficulties of their user experience. Moreover, It was surprising to know the fact that In 2015, a total of 1.02 million people were blind, and approximately 3.22 million people in the United States had vision impairment, by 2050, the numbers of these conditions are projected to double to approximately 2.01 million people who are blind. Then I was thinking in a relation to the vision and the hearing, how blind and visually impaired people could enjoy playing the musical instruments. And I came up with the idea of musical instruments for the blind or visually impaired. I thought of improving the sense of touch with textures on the instruments. By learning through interaction of each texture with notes accordingly, the user can easily learn to use musical instruments.

The first application is using different types of natural ingredients for each keynote. The ingredients of banana, mandarin, Asian pear, mushroom, persimmon, and tomato.