"Joe Haldeman - None So Blind (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

if a child wanted to play such a huge, ungainly instrument. As his eye
dances
along the little fenceposts of notes, his fingers automatically perform
a
one-to-one transformation that is the theoretical equivalent of adding
and
subtracting octaves, fifths, and thirds, but all of the actual mental
work is
done when he looks up in the top right corner of the first page and
says, "Aw
hell. Cello again." Cello parts aren't that interesting to
saxophonists.
But the eye is the key, and the visual cortex is the lock. When blind
Amy
"sight-reads" for the violin, she has to stop playing and feel the
Braille notes
with her left hand. (Years of keeping the instrument in place while she
does
this has made her neck muscles so strong that she can crack a walnut
between her
chin and shoulder.) The visual cortex is not involved, of course; she
"hears"
the mute notes of a phrase with her fingertips, temporarily memorizing
them, and
then plays them over and over until she can add that phrase to the rest
of the
piece.
Like most blind musicians, Amy had a very good "ear"; it actually took
her less
time to memorize music by listening to it repeatedly, rather than
reading, even
with fairly complex pieces. (She used Braille nevertheless for serious
work, so
she could isolate the composer's intent from the performer's or
conductor's
phrasing decisions.)
She didn't really miss being able to sight-read in a conventional way.
She
wasn't even sure what it would be like, since she had never seen sheet
music
before she lost her sight, and in fact had only a vague idea of what a
printed
page of writing looked like.
So when her father came to her in her 33rd year and offered to buy her
the
chance of a limited gift of sight, she didn't immediately jump at it.
It was
expensive and risky and grossly deforming: implanting miniaturized
video cameras
in her eyesockets and wiring them up to stimulate her dormant optic