Eyes Unstrung

And my tunes were played on a harp unstrung

— Robert Hunter, Grateful Dead

That’s a lyric from my favorite Grateful Dead song, Ripple.

What is EyesUnstrung?

TLDR; it’s a website dedicated to accessible material to learn about music and playing guitar.

Like many people, I’ve been trying to learn to play the guitar for many years. Lots of starts and, well, not so much stops, fading aways.

So much material for learning guitar, probably most musical instruments, is visual. I have posters, from when I could see, with images of fingering for dozens of chords. Then there’s sheet music, which is inherently visual. For guitar, there’s tablature, also visual. Even on YouTube videos, I so often hear, “place your fingers like this…” Some YouTubers do try to explain the fingering, but inevitably, there’s a visual assumption.

I’m sure there’s some accessible material out there considering how many blind musicians there are. It’s either not easy to find, or I’m not very good at searching. Probably both.

So, after hearing some podcasts on RealPython I decided I’d write an app for blind and low vision people wanting to learn to play guitar.

Okay, nice, but what about unstrung?

In Spring, 2017, I lost my sight. My optic nerves stroked out from blood loss due to injuries from a car accident. As I was thinking of names for this project, I wanted a subtle reference to music and blindness. The idea came to me of the optic nerve being the string from the eye to the brain. And now my eyes are unstrung.

What’s in the Box

As noted above, I’m blind, learning to play guitar, and interested in music theory. As I progress along this learning path, I intend to have notes, and tools I’ve written to enforce those ideas. Keep in mind I’m both relatively new to blindness and definitely new to learning music. There will be blog posts at least tangentially related to those topics, and, eventually, some tools you can run on a laptop to assist with learning.

Learn More

I don’t want to put too much on this main page. Check out the about page for a bit more background. And, of course, the blog where you can read my ramblings and plans for the app.

Comments?

Do you have any feedback? Feel free to open an issue in the eyesunstrung github repo.