🎶  For Musicians 🎼

Contributed by Judith Lung

 

DottedNotes — Free, Open Braille Music Transcription

For blind composers and musicians, getting from a braille score to something a sighted collaborator can read — or to something you can hear played back — has historically meant paying a transcriber $4 to $12 per page, or purchasing dedicated software that can cost hundreds of dollars. I built DottedNotes because I don’t think composing music should cost blind musicians more time or money than it costs sighted composers.

DottedNotes is a free, open-source tool that converts between braille music notation (BRF/BRL), MusicXML, and LilyPond — in any direction.

The two features I’m most excited about:

Braille to print, and braille to BANA-formatted braille. You can write a full score directly in braille and get back a publication-quality, engraved PDF score, with no separate purchase and no sighted intermediary required at any step. And because the tool understands BANA convention specifically, not just generic braille music formatting, it can also take a score and return corrected, properly BANA-formatted braille, flagging exactly which part and measure needs a fix if something doesn’t follow convention. That means a composer working without a sighted proofreader can catch and correct their own errors.

MIDI playback. Because DottedNotes bundles LilyPond, an open-source music engraving language that outputs PDF and MIDI, any score you convert can be compiled straight to audio, so you can hear what you’ve written without needing to find someone to play or read it back to you first. For composing independently, that immediate feedback loop matters a lot.

Beyond those two, DottedNotes also:
– Extracts individual instrument parts from a full ensemble score, in both braille and print, so you can hand out playable parts to your ensemble
– Supports solo instrument, keyboard, vocal, chamber, and orchestral scores
– Is completely open source — the code is public, and contributions are welcome, especially from blind and low-vision developers and musicians
– Doesn’t require an account, and doesn’t automatically send your scores or error logs to me or anyone else — what you transcribe stays yours

DottedNotes is free, actively developed, and will stay free. If you try it and run into something confusing or broken, I’d genuinely like to hear about it — that feedback is how it gets better.

You can try it at www.dottednotes.net.