[MusicTlk] DottedNotes — bidirectional braille ⇄ LilyPond/MusicXML translator (built out of my own frustration transcribing orchestral scores)

[Ella Yu]

Hi Judith, I think this is a really interesting tool, and I definitely
intend to experiment with it soon. Just out of curiosity, have you looked
into Sao Mai Braille and MuseScore? MuseScore, despite being fully
mainstream notation software, supports braille music input/output at a very
basic level now, though this is slated to be improved in the future. While
Sao Mai Braille is a MusicXML to braille translator and does other braille
tasks as well outside of music, its translation is very high quality for a
free program. I know this may be a bit of a stretch, but you could perhaps
reach out to the Sao Mai Center for the Blind, since they are also the ones
responsible for MuseScore's braille features, and maybe your ideas and
theirs could merge together to make your vision come true, since their
BungSang translation engine is incredibly well-developed for braille music
and they appear open to working with developers.
I know this may seem like a stretch, but just some thoughts.

On Tue, Jul 21, 2026 at 11:50 AM Judith Lung via MusicTlk <
musictlk at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm a blind composer, and for years my biggest bottleneck wasn't writing
> the music — it was getting it out of braille and into something a
> publisher, ensemble, or sighted collaborator could actually use.
> Transcribing an orchestral score from braille into LilyPond by hand
> could eat several days of work before I'd even gotten to the actual
> engraving and proofing. That grind is what pushed me to build
> DottedNotes.
>
> It's a free, bidirectional translator between:
> - Braille music (.brf / .brl)
> - LilyPond (.ly, which compiles straight to publication-quality .pdf and
> .midi)
> - MusicXML (.musicxml / .mxl)
>
> So you can go from a braille manuscript to a publisher-ready PDF and
> MIDI in one pass, or take a print/MusicXML score and get a proper
> braille edition out the other end — with BANA validation built in
> (standard or strict profile), configurable compression levels, and
> layout presets for solo piano, art song, chamber, orchestral, and lead
> sheet scores, since orchestral formatting has its own headaches that a
> generic converter won't get right.
>
> It's also useful if you're a sighted composer, engraver, or publisher
> who needs to move a score between these formats, or produce a braille
> edition without knowing braille music code yourself.
>
> Free to use here: https://www.dottednotes.net/
>
> I built this to solve my own problem, but I know braille music workflows
> vary a lot person to person, so I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from
> other blind musicians — especially anyone who's dealt with the same
> orchestral-score transcription slog. Bug reports, edge cases in the
> braille code handling, feature requests all welcome.
>
> Best,
> Judith
>
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