Professor Sarah Sayce

Research by a team at Kingston University in London has revealed that, despite concerns that ‘garden grabbing’ is on the rise, the likelihood that the developers will be moving into a garden near you is not increasing. According to the research, in most places you are no more likely to look over your fence and see a block of flats emerging from your neighbour’s rose beds now than you were in 2003.

The study by Professor Sarah Sayce, Head of the School of Surveying and Planning at Kingston University showed that across Britain there had been no significant increase in garden developments between April 2003 and March 2008. Professor Sayce led a team of researchers who looked into the scale and type of garden development across the country, and asked whether local planning authorities regarded building in back gardens as a significant problem within their area.

Slightly more than one third of local authorities who responded to the survey perceived garden grabbing to be a problem, although the picture was extremely varied across the country. In some areas where there was little other land for development, building on gardens could be the only way for local authorities to reach their housing targets, Professor Sayce explained. “There has been no significant shift from house to flat building in garden space, with the exception of London, and location, type of local authority and local planning policy all play a part in determining whether garden developments are seen as a problem,” she said.

All 363 local planning authorities in Britain were approached for their views in the first phase of the research, which was commissioned by the United Kingdom Government’s Department for Communities and Local Government. Of the 127 authorities who responded, ‘garden grabbing’ was of greatest concern in the south-east, although London and the west-midlands also felt it was an issue.

Large urban and significant rural authorities were most likely to highlight residential garden development as a problem, with most concern coming from the more rural areas. Professor Sayce said that it was perhaps unsurprising that apprehension was highest in the countryside. “This kind of building work is more likely to be seen as problem where there is not much other land available for development, therefore mainly in rural areas on the edge of greenfield sites,” she said. “Our research also shows that garden development presents fewer challenges to authorities that have tight local planning policies. Rural authorities tend to have fewer planners and resources are more likely to be stretched, leaving less time for policy development.”

Authorities with a comprehensive Local Development Framework, and supplementary planning policies, were more likely to receive planning applications that would be supported. Of those applications refused, less went to appeal. Smaller rural planning authorities, with less capacity to develop comprehensive policies, often received a greater number of problematic applications.

The research was published last week by the Department for Communities and Local Government.  Housing and Planning Minister John Healey said: “Over time, so-called garden grabbing can change the look and feel of a community without giving local people a choice, so it is good news that councils have told our independent experts that it is not a problem in most areas. I am determined to keep it that way and to see tougher action in a small number of hotspots.

“For my part, I am changing the official guidance for planners to make it crystal clear that previously developed or former garden land is not necessarily suitable for development, and that the impact on the surrounding area should be considered.”

Professor Sayce and her team found that whether garden developments were appropriate depended on a complex set of inter-related factors. They could help to meet local housing need, particularly in areas where there was little other suitable land, and enabled residential building where there was existing infrastructure. The sites were often small, so particularly suitable for local developers who employed local people. However, building on garden land could lead to increased building mass, loss of character, increased population density and a range of environmental concerns caused by loss of green space.

These, sometimes contradictory, issues presented real challenges for the sustainable development community, Professor Sayce said. “There are complicated considerations surrounding issues such as the right to decent homes, population density and associated demands on services, the loss of habitat, biodiversity and other environmental issues such as flash flooding,” she added. “These are the sorts of conflicts we face as we try to decide what we mean by sustainable development. Whilst our research has started to look at some of these issues and what they might mean for planning policy, there is a need for more investigation at local level as the issues vary greatly.”

Source; http://www.kingston.ac.uk/pressoffice/news/61/26-01-2010-hydrangeas-to-high-rise.html

Blind musicians have had restricted access to scores due to the scarcity and limitations of Braille transcriptions. A new European system makes music for the blind more available and far easier to use.

The iconic image of the blind musician dates back at least to the time of Homer. It’s a fitting image, since music is an art form to which blindness does not raise any intrinsic barriers.

Until the first quarter of the 19th century, however, blind musicians could learn music only by ear. Louis Braille changed that when he invented a system for transcribing musical scores into a tactile code.

Unfortunately, both transcribing – which had to be done by a sighted musician – and reading Braille music proved difficult. Braille’s linear format makes it hard to decipher the many aspects of music that occur simultaneously, such as chords or multiple voices.

It’s estimated that less than 15 percent of printed music has ever been transcribed into Braille, and much of that is only locally available.

CONTRAPUNCTUS aimed to use digital technology to create an enriched and standardised digital format that would make it easier to transcribe music into Braille and make musical scores for the blind universally available and more useful.

Blind and visually impaired musicians worldwide can now enjoy the benefits of the CONTRAPUNCTUS system. They can download enriched, multimedia scores from a growing digital library, study them with greatly enhanced flexibility, and add new scores to the library as well.

“The music page in Braille has been like a city with lots of blank walls and very few signs,” says Antonio Quatraro, the CONTRAPUNCTUS project coordinator. “CONTRAPUNCTUS has enriched this page with all kinds of information concerning every musical element – a note, a rest, a tie, fingering, etc. It used to be a labyrinth where you could go in but might never come out. Now, with our system, you can always find your way around.”

Well-tempered software and standards

A core feature of CONTRAPUNCTUS is a new digital format for encoding all aspects of a musical score in a standardised and easily accessible way using a software package called RESONARE. The resulting Braille Music Markup Language, BMML, reorganises written music into a highly structured, easily searchable database.

Blind musicians can read any BMML score by using another program, the Braille Music Reader (BMR). As opposed to painstakingly deciphering a traditional Braille score, a musician using BMR can dissect it like a skilled surgeon and study it in any number of ways.

First, Quatraro explains, BMR can describe musical elements from individual notes to changes in tempo or dynamics in spoken form.

Next, BMR can play the music using a MIDI interface. “As you read through the music on your computer, the notes are played to you as written,” says Quatraro. “That’s important, since a commercial recording cannot be as accurate as the printed score, just as a spoken story cannot convey its spelling and punctuation.”

Crucially, BMR lets a blind musician add notations such as fingerings, breath marks or interpretive comments to the score, just as sighted musicians do.

In addition, the musician can analyse the score selectively, for example singling out only the left hand, or one measure, or one chord.

Users with access to a computerised Braille display can read any part of the enriched score by touch. Of course, the enriched Braille score can also be printed.

Combine all these features, Quatraro says, and you get a system that makes a blind musician’s life a lot easier. “It’s as if you had driven all your life on a bicycle, and now you have a car,” he says.

Beyond the tower of Babel

In addition to creating a new way for musicians to read and learn music, the CONTRAPUNCTUS team also wanted to make Braille music universally accessible.

Before CONTRAPUNCTUS, musicians faced a Babel of languages because each transcription centre had its own production standards, suggests Quatraro. “Whatever transcriptions that were produced were difficult to access and readable only by a few experts.”

The group attacked those problems by creating a standardised format for Braille music based on XML, a widely used set of rules for digitising documents of all kinds and making them easily accessible on the internet.

They hope that, as more musicians, transcribers and libraries use CONTRAPUNCTUS, the Braille music XML format they developed will become the de facto standard.

The suite of software they have produced and made available is already breaking down long-standing barriers.

CONTRAPUNCTUS has created an online portal as an access point to a Braille score library, compiling contributions from the most important European libraries for the blind. Musicians anywhere in the world can now download software for free from the CONTRAPUNCTUS website and start to explore enriched, multimodal, and easily navigable musical scores.

“It’s as if we had a hidden treasure which nobody could access,” says Quatraro. “But we found the key that unlocks the treasure created by generations of transcribers.”

James Risdon, Music Officer at the UK’s Royal National Institute of Blind People, agrees. He has gathered feedback about CONTRAPUNCTUS from blind musicians throughout England. According to him, they are thrilled to be able to download music instantly, find that they benefit greatly from the system’s multimodal features, and very much like being able to annotate scores as they work on them.

“These three features make it a very exciting development,” he says.

The CONTRAPUNCTUS project received funding from the ICT strand of the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for research.

Source: http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=article&BrowsingType=Features&ID=91118