The choir director, Gordon Mansell, along with the senior cantor, Shawn Scanlan, were not about to let blindness deprive the choir of a precious resource – a tenor!
How to get the words to Giangioppo from the hymnal proved to be a challenge. At first, they thought they would provide him with a copy of the hymns ahead of time and hope that someone would be available to type the words out for him which he could then translate into braille.
“We can do better than that,” declared Scanlan, adding “We look after people here at OLS.” He told Mansell to leave it up to him, promising that he would come up with something. Technically gifted, Scanlan did just that by coming up with an artificial intelligence-based solution.
First, Scanlan found that he could obtain the words for all the songs in their hymn book most affordably by obtaining a guitar music subscription from Oregon Catholic Press. He then took the .pdf file and ran it through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) website (sejda.com) which produced what Scanlan described as an “alphabet soup.”
The alphabet soup of words as presented in hymn books can’t be used right away by a braille translator. Problems arise because the words often have dashes between syllables, with odd punctuation and capitalization appearing mid-sentence, and the first verse of a hymn might be on eight different lines.
“By the grace of God, and sheer tenacity,” Scanlan said, he was able to leverage the AI-powered ChatGPT tool to generate a usable text. Now he just types in the process name (‘nat’ followed by a colon) in ChatGPT and out comes text that he can copy into an email to Giangioppo.
Giangioppo then puts the text into his braille translation software. He uses the latest version of DBT (Duxbury translator) from Duxbury Systems which he believes is “by far the program of choice for the production of braille literature.” He prints out these lyrics and often uses the Cantamus website to learn his musical part.
Giangioppo’s own technical expertise is impressive. He worked at IBM for 25 years and rose to the position of Senior Lab Technician. They had not hired a blind person before, but were so impressed with Giangioppo that they said “We don’t know how you are going to do it, but we know you can do it” and hired him in 1981.
Giangioppo also impressed a parish priest when he auditioned as an organist at St. Mark’s in Etobicoke. The priest asked him how he was going to play as he was blind. Fortunately, Giangioppo knew the hymn for the audition, and the priest said. “You know, I am looking for an organist, and you are a good one.” Giangioppo played at St. Mark’s for 18 years and then played at St. John the Evangelist Parish for another 13 years.
After having triple bypass surgery requiring veins from his legs, however, he was temporarily unable to use the pedals on the organ. Undaunted, Giangioppo responded enthusiastically when Fr. Chris Cauchi, pastor at OLS, announced that they were looking for people interested in joining the choir. “I’m going to go for it!”, Giangioppo said.
He now gets a great deal of enjoyment out of singing adding, “maybe even more than playing.”
To help those interested in trying this solution out for their own choirs, Scanlan asked ChatGPT to summarize the prompt he uses to process the text. ChatGPT provided the following:
"Please process the text provided under 'nat:' by ensuring all grammatical and punctuation errors are corrected. The text should be formatted according to standard English usage, with proper attention to capitalization and line breaks. Make sure to clearly delineate and label all verses and refrains, and remove any extraneous or non-essential text, especially notes about musical accompaniment. Provide a clean and well-structured final version suitable for presentation or publication. The output should clearly separate different sections like verses and refrain, ensuring it is ready for professional use or public sharing, focusing on accuracy and readability."