Table of Contents

  1. About
  2. Accessibility
  3. Speech Commands
  4. Keyboard Shortcuts
  5. Issues
  6. Get Involved

About

LunarTuner is an accessible instrument tuning software, designed to be usable by the blind. LunarTuner has several features that lend themselves to this purpose, including a built-in speech notification system and a speech recognition system for controlling the application. LunarTuner was developed by Marc Allen, Chris Leung, and Dave Woolard in collaboration with Project:Possibility (http://projecpossibility.org).

LunarTuner is primarily Java-based, using the FreeTTS and Sphinx libraries for text-to-speech and speech recognition, respectively. Platform-specific distributions of the FFTW library are used to do pitch detection using the Harmonic Spectrum Product (HSP) algorithm. LunarTuner currently works best on Mac OS/X, and works well on Windows XP with limited speech recognition performance.

Back to Top

Accessibility

LunarTuner is accessible in several ways. A blind user can either use the built in text-to-speech (TTS) engine or their own software. It is recommended to use the LunarTuner TTS engine, as it is directly integrated with LunarTuner and will be the most responsive to tuning events. The LunarTuner TTS engine can be disabled or enabled by pressing the "S" key.

Every field in LunarTuner is accessible. By pressing "Tab" the user can navigate through the different fields, and the state of the field will be read when it is focused. The current field can be read by pressing the "Shift" key. In order, the fields in LunarTuner are

  1. Note Heard. This text field contains the current note and an error percentage.
  2. Instructions. This text field contains tuning instructions when an instrument is selected.
  3. Instrument Type. This dropdown menu contains a list of instruments. The default instrument is "Automatic", which contains every note. Note: on OS/X, dropdown menus will not speak each item as you go up and down in the list. When an item is selected by pressing enter, the selection will be spoken.
  4. Instrument Note. This dropdown menu will contain a list of notes for the selected instrument.
  5. Play Note. When this button is pressed, the selected note will be played through the speakers.
  6. Enable Notify. When this checkbox is toggled, LunarTuner will speak the current state periodically as defined by the "Notify Interval" dropdown menu. When the instrument is "Automatic", the current note will be spoken, and when another instrument is selected the instructions will be spoken. The default value is off.
  7. Notify Interval. This dropdown menu contains a list of intervals from 3 to 10 seconds, controlling the rate at which LunarTuner will speak tuning updates. The default value is 5 seconds.
  8. Enable Speech. When this checkbox is toggled, the text-to-speech system is active. The default value is on.
  9. Enable Recognition. When this checkbox is toggled, the speech recognition system is active. The default value is on.
Back to Top

Speech Commands

Set Commands

  • set instrument <instrument name>
  • set note <note name>
  • set interval <number> seconds
  • set speech <enabled or disabled>
  • set recognition <enabled or disabled>

Read Commands

  • read instrument
  • read note
  • read interval
  • read instructions
  • read speech
  • read instructions
Note Commands
  • play note
  • next note
  • last note
  • shift octave <up or down>
Back to Top

Keyboard Shortcuts

  • A: About
  • H: Help
  • N: Enable Notify
  • S: Enable Speech
  • R: Enable Recognition
Back to Top

Issues

In Windows, LunarTuner has excessive latency with speech commanding. This issue is currently unresolved and being investigated.

There is currently no way to save a LunarTuner session to a configuration file. This feature needs to be added.

Back to Top

Get Involved

Do you have a feature request? Did you find a bug? Do you have a suggestion? Do you want to get involved with the development of LunarTuner? Please visit http://projectpossibility.org, or email Marc Allen (allen dot marc at nospam gmail dot com).

Back to Top