Jostiband makes music with color notes accessible to everyone

If you want to play a musical instrument, it is useful if you can read notes. But for those who find the ordinary musical notation a bit too hard to crack, the Jostiband has a solution. The orchestra for people with intellectual disabilities has been using colors for years to make reading music easier.

From now on, this method is available to everyone, with a color music book and an online platform, says orchestra leader Lyan Verburg in the NOS Radio 1 News: “Making music is so much fun. That is a happiness that the Jostiband has experienced for 55 years, we want to share that with other people.”

The system works like this: under the regular staff, a color and a letter indicate which note is involved. For example, a C in a yellow circle, a D in a blue circle or an A in a white circle. Those colors correspond to a sticker on a key of a keyboard or a xylophone. This makes it much easier for the musician to translate the music on the sheet into the key that belongs to it.

An example of a music sheet with color notation:

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