Touch & Sound

The nation's 400, 000 blind can escape their dark prison only through touch and sound. This week, to charter subscribers went copies of a new quarterly that seeks to guide its blind readers, through touch, into their favorite corner of the world of sound. Its name: Overtones. Its subject: music.

Overtones joins the list of publications for the 160,000*; who have learned to read by the Braille system of raised dots. It is aimed exclusively at the blind person's understandable love of music. In its eleven articles--reprinted free from such publications as the New York Times, Musical America and TIME--Overtones advises readers on tape recorders, introduces them to Bruno Walter and Leontyne Price, tells them about new records.

The quarterly is the inspiration of George Bennette, whose sightlessness has not affected his career as a concert pianist.

Only eight months ago, Bennette, who is also head of the New York Association for the Blind's Lighthouse Music School, proposed his idea to a fellow pianist and teacher at the Lighthouse. Edward Muller, 31. After Bennette found a benefactress, he and Muller were in business.

Although subscribers are charged $2 a year, Overtones will remain largely a labor of love. Except for Editor Muller. who is paid $100 a month, it has no staff; proofreaders, secretaries and others at the Lighthouse's Braille press have simply taken on the added duty of producing Overtones four times a year. Rock-bottom cost per year is $2,500--and, as circulation grows, so will the deficit. But Editor Muller is counting on other gifts to keep Overtones going. "You have no idea," says he, "what this sort of thing means to a blind person."

* There are 72 Braille magazines (total circulation: 95,045), including a special edition of the Reader's Digest sent free to 3,800 people.

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