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

[melissaariccobono at gmail.com]

Wow. This looks amazing! Thank you so much for creating this. I am a singer, and receive PDF versions of music for my choir. I have done nothing with them, but it sounds as if I could put them into this program and get them in Braille??!! Amazing!
Melissa

-----Original Message-----
From: Perform-Talk <perform-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Judith Lung via Perform-Talk
Sent: Saturday, July 18, 2026 5:19 PM
To: perform-talk at nfbnet.org
Cc: judith at judithlung.com
Subject: [Perform-Talk] DottedNotes — bidirectional braille ⇄ LilyPond/MusicXML translator (built out of my own frustration transcribing orchestral scores)

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 export a proper braille edition — 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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