Navigating the Score

This is a very long topic. It covers moving between staves, moving from bar to bar, moving from note to note, moving between voices and even covers the basic information keystrokes and verbosity presets.

You may find it helpful to open a score in Sibelius, so that you can try things out as you read this topic. It would be best to use one of the example scores which come with Sibelius. You can find these in a folder called “Example Scores” which is in the scores folder that Sibelius has created for you. If this is your first time using Sibelius, then some of the example scores should be shown in the recent files submenu of the file menu. A good example score to start with is the “Bebop.sib” score. The keystrokes which you use to navigate the score are actually making selections. In other words, each time you use a so called navigation keystroke, you will be selecting one item in the score. It is important to stress that you will only be selecting one item; there are different keystrokes set aside for selecting more than one item at a time, which are discussed elsewhere.

Selecting the first item

When you first open a score, you may find that nothing is selected. This will be obvious to you, because JAWS will say “no selection” when you press the arrow keys. If this is the case, then you’ll need to select something before you can begin navigating.

Once an item has been selected, it will be described. There is a lot of information in the description, so it might take you a few moments to get used to the announcements which JAWS is speaking. These announcements will be described in more detail later.

Moving between staves

The music for each instrument is written onto a staff. Some instruments, like the piano, will have two or more staves however, navigation works in the same way for all staves.

These keystrokes select an item in the staff above or below. This item will be in the same bar and will be rhythmically as close as possible to the item which you are moving away from. For example, if you have selected the note on the 3rd quarter note of bar 8 and then press Alt+Control+DownArrow, Sibelius will try to select the note on the 3rd quarter note of bar 8 in the staff below. If there is no note on the 3rd quarter note, then it will select the next closest item.

As you move to each staff, its name is spoken. This name is the one which is printed immediately to the left of the staff in the score. If the staff belongs to an instrument that has more than one staff then a letter is spoken in brackets after the name, to identify which of the instruments staves you have moved to. For example, “Piano [a]” is the first piano staff and “Piano [b]“ is the second staff.

You will also notice that JAWS says something like “voice 1” immediately after the name of the staff. This is because each item in the score can be assigned to a different voice, and you need to know which one the item belongs to. Voices are discussed later in this topic.

Finally, after the name and voice are spoken, you will be given a description of the item that has been selected.

The key signature is spoken with the staff because you can have different key signatures on different staves (although this is very rarely done). It is also useful to know the current clef, because this can have a drastic affect on the way the notes appear in the score.

The instrument description includes a lot of information, too much to cover hear. However, if you hold down the control key and tap F2 twice quickly, the information will be shown in the virtual viewer, so that you can use the arrow keys to read the information line by line.

Moving across the staff

If there is nothing selected, Ctrl+Home takes you to the first note or rest on the top staff and Ctrl+End takes you to the last note or rest on the bottom staff.

There is a big difference between what happens when you press tab and the right arrow key. The tab key will always select the very next item in the bar and you can always use it. The right arrow key will however, only work when a note or rest is selected, and it will select the next note or rest, jumping over other types of items.

For example, if you have selected a note which is followed by a symbol and another note, pressing Tab will select the symbol, whereas pressing RightArrow will take you to the note.

Ctrl+RightArrow takes you to the first note of the next bar and this is a good way to move through the score quickly. Ctrl+LeftArrow does the reverse, taking you to the previous bar, however there is one exception. If you have selected a note in the middle of the bar, Ctrl+LeftArrow will take you to the start of the current bar first. After this, you can use it to go to the start of the previous bar. These two keystrokes will also only work if a note or rest is selected.

Important facts about the arrow keys

If you try to use an arrow key on an item which is not a note or rest, a warning message will be spoken telling you that the item cannot be moved. This is because the arrow keys are normally used to move other types of items around on the page and this can seriously damage the layout of a score. For this reason, a “lock” is placed on all items which are note notes or rests so that you cannot move them by accident. This is covered in more detail in the topics on layout.

Fortunately, most of the keystrokes which take you to specific locations within the score will select a note or rest instead of some other kind of item. For example: Ctrl+Home and Shift+Alt+Up both select notes or rest.

One other important point is that the left and right arrow keys work differently in tab staves. This is discussed in the topic on Tab staves.

Announcement of items

In fact, using the arrow keys is the fastest way to move through the score, but you still need to know about the other items in the score. For this reason, these items are spoken at the same time as the notes and rests which you move to.

The additional announcements work as follows:

There are many different types of item and they all need to be described in different ways. For examples:

Information keystrokes

To begin with, you may find it difficult to understand everything which is being spoken, especially when several items are being described at once. For this reason, there are several keystrokes which you can use to have different items spoken separately.

F5 will always describe the selected item, regardless of its type. However, Ctrl+F2 and Ctrl+F3 will only work when a note or rest is selected. The reason for this is simply that these two keystrokes are only used to describe items which are near to a note without you having to tab onto them.

Ctrl+F5 is a useful keystroke if you find that you are getting confused by transposing instruments. Explaining transposing instrument quickly is impossible, you must simply take it for granted that there are situations in which the notes which are written down are not the same as the notes which you will hear. Ctrl+F5 will speak the “real” pitches as you will hear them, instead of those which have been written in the score.

Bars and rhythmic position

Bar lines divide a piece into small sections which can be used to identify a point in the score. For example, if someone says “go to bar 25”, they mean start playing from the note after the 25th bar line.

If you select an item which is in a different bar to the one which was previously selected, then the number of the new bar will be spoken.

The rhythmic position of each item is shown by a decimal number like 1.5 or 2.75. The whole number, before the decimal point, tells you which quarter note the item is in, and the decimal part of the number tells you where the item is positioned within that quarter note. For example:

Lines have two rhythmic positions; one for the left end and another for the right end. You will only hear the position of the left hand end if you are arrowing across the notes however, if you tab onto a line, both ends will be spoken.

Beats or rhythmic position

It is extremely important not to confuse the rhythmic position with the beat. The beats of the bar are determined by the time signature. For example: four-four time has quarter note beats, six-eight time has eighth note beats and three-two time has half note beats. The rhythmic position is always described in quarter notes, no matter what the time signature might be. This is actually very useful, because it means that there is never any doubt as to what the position of an item might be.

Grace notes

These are covered in much more detail in the topic Grace notes however, there is one important fact that you should know at this point.

Sibelius refers to all grace notes as either appoggiaturas or acciaccaturas. They are used to decorate a melody. The way in which they are played varies, and a lot is down to the individual tastes of the player however, grace notes have no affect on the overall length of a bar. For example, you could have a bar with four quarter notes and twenty grace notes but the bar would still only last for four quarter notes.

For this reason, grace notes are given the same rhythmic position as the note which they come immediately before. For example, if you had four quarters in a bar and a grace note in front of each, then the positions of the grace notes would be quarter 1, quarter 2, quarter 3 and quarter 4. In other words, the same as the proper notes them selves.

You navigate to grace notes in the same way as you would any other type of note however, you need to be aware of the fact that the rhythmic positions of these notes will be exactly the same as the notes that they come before. For example, if you have three grace notes in a row, followed by a normal note, then all four notes will have the same rhythmic position.

Moving between the notes of a chord

You will have noticed that a chord is treated as though it is a single item, no matter how many notes it has. In other words, each time you press the right arrow key, you will be taken to a different chord.

In fact, Sibelius doesn’t select the entire chord when you move to it; it only selects one note, which is usually the top note. If you want to move to a different note within that chord then you must used different keystrokes.

Each time you move to a different note in the chord, its pitch will be described. You will also be told if the note is tied, or if it has an unusually shaped note head. Finally, you will be told where that note is within the chord. For example: note 2 of 3 indicates the middle note of a three note chord.

The pitches are normally read from top to bottom, however you can change this in the verbosity dialog so that they are read from bottom to top.

Voices

Each item in the bar can be assigned to a voice. There are four possible voices and any of these four could be used. There is also no requirement that the voices be consecutive. For example, you could have items in voices 1 and 4 without using voices 2 and 3.

Voice 1 is usually treated as the highest voice and voice four the lowest. For example, if you are writing a soprano part and an alto part on the same staff, then the soprano part will be in voice 1 and the alto part in voice 2.

The reason why this is important is that when you move along a staff, you will only move to the items which are in one voice. Which voice this is will depend on how you moved to the staff, but you can use the following keystrokes to move to a different voice.

One consequence of voices is that you may sometimes skip across several bars at once, if those bars contain no items in the voice that you are working on. For example, you might have voice 2 notes in bars 11, 12 and 13; more voice 2 notes in bars 21, 22 and 23; but no voice 2 notes in bars 14 to 20. If you pressed tab whilst the last voice 2 note in bar 13 was selected, then you would jump straight to the first voice 2 note in bar 21.

If you move to an item which is in a different voice to the one which was previously selected, the new voice number will be spoken before the item is described.

Different voices in different bars

If you move into a bar which has items in different voices to the previous bar, then JAWS will speak the voice number of the selected item and the total number of voices in that bar. For example, “voice 1 of 2”.

It must be stressed that you’ll hear the announcement if the voice numbers change, not the total number of voices. For example, bar 100 could have notes in voices 1 and 2; and bar 101 could have notes in voices 1 and 3. Both bars contain 2 voices but the voices are different. This means that if you move from bar 100 into bar 101 then you would hear the message “voice 1 of 2”.

You should also take note of the fact that the second number of the announcement is not the number of the lowest voice, but the total number of voices. For instance, moving into a bar which uses only voices 1 and 4 will trigger the announcement “voice 1 of 2”, not “voice 1 of 4”.

Verbosity settings

The verbosity features are very powerful and make Sibelius Access the kind of tool that professionals working to a deadline need. They can be used to control precisely what JAWS speaks as you move around the score and even allow you to focus on one particular type of information, which can be very useful if you need to quickly check specific details. You can even change the order of the announcements that JAWS makes.

These features are discussed fully in another topic but the verbosity presets enable you to take advantage of these features without needing any detailed knowledge.

Pressing Alt+F1 opens the verbosity dialog. You’ll be placed in the list of all available verbosity presets, so just use the arrow keys to select a preset and then press Shift+Tab to go to the OK button and press it.

Filtered text

This is probably the most useful feature in the whole of Sibelius Access. It allows you to pick one type of text and then have those items spoken before any other items.

For example, if you open the filtered text dialog and choose “lyrics”, you will be able to press the right arrow to move from note to note in the score, having lyrics spoken out before all other items. If you then open the verbosity dialog and choose the “For filtered text” preset, you will be able to move through the score and only have lyrics spoken.