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

[Jason Castonguay]

Hello, everyone!

Judith, this is amazing! I have often thought how nice it would be to compose something in music braille, even in a scratch pad kind of way, and then, turn it into something sighted friends can read. And what you’ve created does so much more than that! Thank you for the idea and inspiration to create such a utility and for sharing it with us!


Best regards,


-Jason





> On Jul 18, 2026, at 17:19, Judith Lung via Perform-Talk <perform-talk 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 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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--
Jason Castonguay <jcast77 at gmail.com>

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