Five years ago, 21-year-old Georgia Steel hadn't picked up a viola. Now she's playing it in the National Youth Orchestra.
Georgia has a visual impairment and is using the latest technology to improve her musical skills.
She now uses a large tablet, which is the size of a computer screen, to display her music. Georgia enlarges the score to a size she can comfortably read and changes the page with a foot pedal. The tablet sits perfectly on a music stand.
And she has been able to do away with the cumbersome A3 pages she used to put into a booklet and that would invariably topple off the stand.
Georgia says she no longer has to memorise everything she plays or otherwise try to guess what a written note is by working out the distance between it and the previous note.
Playing in an orchestra has opened up a new world to Georgia. “I just think there’s nothing quite like the sound of 100 players joining together and playing music… I would like to be able to play professionally in an orchestra. Yeah, that’s my end goal.”
