BMML: A Mark-Up Language for Braille Music

Enrico Bortolazzi1, Nadine Baptiste-Jessel2, and Giovanni Bertoni3

1 Veia Progetti s.r.l., via Porto S. Michele 25, 37133 Verona, Italy
bortolazzi@veia.it
2 Universitè Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France

baptiste@irit.fr
3 Arca Progetti s.r.l., via Segai 8, 37020 Stallavena (VR), Italy

bmk@dodiesis.com

Abstract. The need of an interchange format for music notation led to several
XML encoding initiatives and among them to MusicXML, a de facto standard
format supported by market leaders. The result is that music scores can be
shared between applications and between users, delivered through the web
and/or archived independently by the application that generated them. Braille
music is a specific music notation for blind users, written in linear format, char-
acter by character. Traditionally Braille scores in electronic format are archived
or shared as text files, with only character information dependent on some
translation table. The available XML formats for music notation are not suit-
able to cover this specific notation. We present our approach to the problem and
the key design concepts behind Braille Music Mark-up Language, developed as
an open format by the EU funded CONTRAPUNCTUS[1] project.

Keywords: Braille music, music notation, XML, BMML.

1 Introduction
Braille music, a linear notation that was invented by Louis Braille along with literary
notation, is a specialization of Braille which allows standard music notation to be rep-
resented through a series of Braille cells. Since the Braille cells available are only the
63 permutations of 6 dots plus the empty cell, to represent all the music symbols and
concepts several combinations are used.
The information in a music score (pitch, chords, articulations...) are all put in linear
format, written character by character, leading to a long text to be read sequentially
and interpreted: the meaning of Braille cells or combinations is usually clear when an
amount of data is read and contextualized.
Despite its complexity the Braille music code remains the only successful and
widely used method to read and write music by blind musicians.
When computers and consequently digital documents became in common use, the
natural code for storing the Braille code was the ASCII file with each of the 64 Braille
cells mapped to an ASCII character according to a translation table usually different
from country to country. This solution worked for a long period, when the principal
use of these files was for embossing (printing in raised dots), their storage limited to
the library that produced them, and the delivery to users on paper.

K. Miesenberger et al. (Eds.): ICCHP 2008, LNCS 5105, pp. 310–317, 2008.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
 BMML: A Mark-Up Language for Braille Music 311

Nowadays needs have changed, users want to access an electronic version of their
scores, get them from different libraries, share them with colleagues and use them as
sighted musicians do with their notation softwares like Finale or Sibelius.
The use of a structured format, as an XML format, is today necessary for encoding,
archiving and transmitting music scores in electronic format. Also sharing of scores
between sighted and blind musicians would largely benefit from a format that convey
structured information and can easily be converted to other formats, without neglect-
ing the development of new teaching and professional tools for musicians and librari-
ans, as well as researchers.
This step was already done for standard music notation and led to several XML en-
coding initiatives[2]. Among them MusicXML[3][4] emerged as a de facto standard
format open to use by anyone under a royalty-free license. At the time of writing over
90 applications support this format including market leaders for music notation edit-
ing and scanning. Nowadays is possible to scan a score on paper, save it in Mu-
sicXML format, open it with a notation software and make corrections or annotation,
send it to a printing house, deliver it through internet, archive it with enriched data.
This is possible using multiple softwares.

2 The Braille Music Notation

The Braille music notation in more than 150 years of life and use in several countries
saw many dialects and a lot of standardization efforts. The latest effort produced, the
International Manual of Braille music Notation was compiled by Betty Krolick (USA)
and published by the Braille music Subcommittee of the World Blind Union, in 1997
and signed by 16 countries [5]. This can be considered the de facto standard for pro-
ducing Braille Music even if dialects cannot be ignored in the prospective of preserv-
ing and digitalizing the existing scores.
Braille music notation is written as a linear sequence of Braille cells or combina-
tions which have a specific meaning according to their position. To represent all of
the symbols and to ease reading in this format, Braille writing also developed symbols
and concepts that are not present in the standard music notation.
A key issue seems to have greatly influenced the Braille notation development: the
need for reducing the amount of characters written.
In producing a Braille score and in reading it, it's important to save paper and also
to save the amount of information provided. This has lead to some techniques that
have no correspondence in the standard music notation, such as doubling or repeti-
tion. A sighted reader can for example realize easily if a passage or a fragment of mu-
sic is repeated, even if repeated with a slighted variation, for example with a different
pitch. A blind musician reads the sequence of characters that represent the passage,
then a specific symbol tells him that the same passage is repeated for a number of
times, eventually starting from a different pitch indicate with a Braille sign. This way
of writing saves paper as there are less characters to be printed, and also saves the
amount of information given to the user, with benefits for the reading and comprehen-
sion of the music. The same applies for doubling: a passage with some repeating pat-
tern, for example series of dotted notes, can be written in short from indicating only
the start and the end of the passage.
312 E. Bortolazzi, N. Baptiste-Jessel, and G. Bertoni

Due to the differences between Braille music and standard music, the formats pro-
posed and adopted for representing the latter are not suitable for Braille and cannot
take into account all the specific issues: in fact the two ways of representing music
notation can be considered two different languages. Automatic translations between
the two notations are possible and have been implemented, usual from standard music
notation to braille, but this is not always considered satisfactory since the human in-
tervention is always necessary. Automatic conversion from Braille to standard nota-
tion is more complicated due to the lack of music information in the formats used for
Braille music.

3 Software for Braille Music and Existing File Formats

The first Braille music computer transcription programs were created in 1971 in the
USA: SAMBA (Systems Activated for Music Braille Automation) and RUMBA
(Representations Utilizing Music Braille Alphamerics) [6].
Other softwares have been created to transcribe music to Braille and to compose
music directly in Braille. Among them we must recall the ones that are available
commercially and are most used: Goodfeel [7], Toccata [8], BME [9]. Some programs
have been developed by libraries for their own use.
Regarding the formats used for scores Toccata and BME use a proprietary format
while Goodfeel uses a text file with only characters information. Usually software
developed inside the libraries, like ItalBra for the Biblioteca Italiana Ciechi in Monza,
use a text file with or without markers to drive the embossing process. All these for-
mats for different reasons are not suitable for sharing scores or to be used without the
software that generated them.

Example: Incipit of “Für Elise” in ASCII format produced by Goodfeel

,albumblatt #a
8,fur ,elise0

,,keyboard

,poco moto4 #c8

j .>'>pp;b.&%z
_> x
a .>'>c.&%ef>d"j*ed>4
_> m
b .>"i^2m"yc&c!c "jm&c%(c)c
_>^!c_&c!mx ^&c_&c%(mx

Looking at the example we can notice that there's no information about the table
used to generate the ASCII characters. So without this information it's impossible to
emboss the score or present it to the user. But even if we had this information, in the
document the musical information is missing. So a translation to another format, an
analysis of the score or anything else we can do with a score requires a processing of
the document and assign its' meaning to each Braille combination. For example it will
 BMML: A Mark-Up Language for Braille Music 313

be very difficult for a software algorithm to identify the title and the recognition of
notes requires a great amount of logic processing.

4 BMML
BMML was developed to overcome the above mentioned difficulties and to offer new
perspectives to the use of Braille music. The objective is to structure the musical in-
formation content while preserving the layout, since in music and also in Braille mu-
sic meanings are conveyed in both ways. XML code was the natural choice being a
standard language widely supported by software. The formal representation has been
provided in XML Schema or DTD.
In the following we provide a brief overview of the code and the concept adopted
to design it. According to our model, a Braille score is composed of meta data and
one or several elements (time signature, key signature, parts). In addition to meta data
that is already used (Dublin Core for example), elements like: print-link, audio-link,
ISBDPM (International Standard Bibliographic Description for Printed Music) have
been added for improving on the one hand communication between visual impaired
and sighted musicians and, on the other hand, the understanding of the score. Finally,
specific information regarding Braille scores such as the number of lines per page and
the number of symbols per line have been added too.
Each part element contains one or more measures and each measure contains one
or more music data (notes, rests, ...). The information is thus represented in a hierar-
chical structure. Each element can be a container or a text element. A container is an
element that contains other elements, such as a note that contains an octave, a note
type, or one or more slur.
A text element has a textual content. To avoid the mess of translation tables,
Braille cells are univocally represented with their Unicode patterns (see Unicode
standard, table 2800-28FF) or with an entity.
The structure thus results as:
<braille_score>
<header>...metadata...</header>
<part>
<measure>
...
<note pitch="35">
<octave value=”5”>&#x2828;</octave>
<note_type value=”C”>&#x2839;</note_type>
</note>
...
</measure>
...
</part>
...
</braille_score>
Other than text elements that represent the actual text in the Braille documents,
containers have attributes to take into account calculated values. For example the
314 E. Bortolazzi, N. Baptiste-Jessel, and G. Bertoni

pitch of a note is a calculated value depending on the note_type element but also on
the octave element if present or on the context. The same applies for alterations or for
elements that are doubled.
In the example above, “Für Elise” in ASCII format, we can identify (using the right
Braille translation table) the time signature at the end of line 6:
,poco moto4 #c8
In our code the same data is represented as:
<text>...<text>
<space>&#x2800;</space>
<time_signature beats=”3” beat_type=”8”>
<number_sign>&#x283c</number_sign>
<upper_number>;&#x2809</upper_number>
<lower_number>;&#x2826;</lower_number>
</time_signature>
Again, calculated values are expressed as attributes: in the above example the time
signature has a value of 3 over 8.
The element can be easily converted in its textual representation, simply by apply-
ing an XSLT that render the text, and/or translated to other formats using the content
information provided. In the CONTRAPUNCTUS project we developed modules to
read/write the BMML format and also a module to convert in MusicXML.

5 Applications
The CONTRAPUNCTUS project is developing and testing two softwares that can
show the benefits of the BMML code. The first one is Resonare with which ASCII
files can be converted to the new format. Using a recognizing module and ad hoc
conversion tables, together with the human intervention of a Braille transcriber, it will
be possible to transform files that can be used only to emboss into a rich format for
multiple uses. In this way musical heritage can be not only preserved but enriched
with content information. Possible uses of the new documents can be:
- proof reading: errors in a sequence of Braille symbols are very difficult to dis-
cover. The possibility given by the recognition and the transformation of the docu-
ment to audio (MIDI) or standard notation, can ease this job.
- sharing in electronic format independently of the embossing process
- accessibility in multi modality, not only on paper
- conversion to another format like standard notation or spoken music.
The other software is EasyReader, a program that permits to access a braille score
in a new way. Braille music reading takes much more time and requests more effort
than traditional reading, mainly for two reasons: the first is that the information, on
paper or on a braille display, is perceived by the touch which is able to read one type
at the time, the second is because the musician, while he reads, must look through all
the elements one at the time and he cannot make any preventive selection. For the
sighted musician things are much easier. The human eye is immediately able to select
 BMML: A Mark-Up Language for Braille Music 315

Fig. 1. Human eye can concentrate on specific elements and ignore what is all around

Fig. 2. Example of notes with fingering. Non sighted musician cannot decide to ignore some
elements. He has to read them all and then select what he is interested in.

Fig. 3. Example of the above fragment without fingering. With EasyReader user can decide
before "how" to read the score.

the notational elements to be read, ignoring everything is around. A sighted musician

can read only the notes, ignoring all the other symbols and playing at the same time.
This operation cannot be done by a non-sighted person. He is compelled to look
through the score, from the beginning to the end to understand the whole idea. Let us
imagine the labor a beginning student has to accomplish in order to memorize only
score notes and he is forced to read also those elements he does not need in that mo-
ment, but he will be able to learn later on by degree (such accents, dynamics, nuances,
etc…).
EasyReader enable the user to select the amount of information he wants to read, fil-
tering unwanted data, to navigate the score quickly, to have an audio feedback and play
316 E. Bortolazzi, N. Baptiste-Jessel, and G. Bertoni

the whole piece or selected parts. So the first time an user reads for example a new score
for piano probably he will concentrate only on notes, leaving expressions and other in-
formation, he will listen to few measures for each hand and the for both hands. This
learning process will be not so much different from that of a sighted student.
Being able to extract (freely searching) the score structures in order to quickly
memorize is a didactic process dedicated to learning and memorization that may adapt
to the performer student's abilities and needs, thus offering the teacher an useful tool
to experiment suitable strategies and to evaluate the student's learning levels.The
CONTRAPUNCTUS project is evaluating both softwares with groups of transcribers,
teachers and students. At the time of writing the first results show the powerful of the
applications, an high level of interest and satisfaction.

6 Conclusion
The use of a structured code for encoding Braille music can be of a large benefit and
open the door to innovative solutions for writing, reading, studying and delivering.
An incomplete list of applications to be considered:
- Information research and music analysis. Using meta data it is possible to identify
the corresponding print score, the software used to produce the score, author, title and
so on. It is also possible to execute content query on the document for music analysis
purposes.
- Teaching and learning of music to Visually impaired (Braille Music or other-
wise). Innovative software can be developed to navigate and learn music (example
EasyReader developed by the CONTRAPUNCTUS project)
- Music sharing and delivery. The adoption of an open format with the flexibility
of XML can ease the interchange between software and the sharing of music between
users and/or institutions.
- Music conversion to other formats. The structured format can be easily converted
to other format like MIDI, for the production of audio data, or MusicXML, for the
production of standard scores. This will be useful for example for blind teachers that
have sighted students, or for blind composers that has the necessity of providing
scores on paper.
- Music conversion from other formats, for example the large amount of music
scores in internet that at the moment are not accessible to blind musicians.
In the view of the CONTRAPUNCTUS project the adoption of an open inter-
change format, like BMML, can have many positive effects on the development of
innovative applications, on the study of Braille music and on the sharing of music
scores between blind musicians, institutions and sighted musicians.

References
1. Contrapunctus project, http://www.punctus.org
2. Haus, G., Longari, M.: MAX, Musical Application using XML (2002)
3. MusicXML, http://www.recordare.com/xml.html
 BMML: A Mark-Up Language for Braille Music 317

4. Good, M.: Lessons from the Adoption of MusicXML as an Interchange Standard. In: Pro-
ceedings of XML 2006, Boston, December 5-7 (2006)
5. The Braille Music Subcommittee, World Blind Union: New International Manual of Braille
Music Notation
6. Watkins, W., Siems, J.: SAMBA and RUMBA: Systems for Computer Assisted Translation
of Braille Music. Braille Automation Newsletter, 47–51 (August 1976)
7. Goodfeel, http://www.dancingdots.com/main/goodfeel.htm
8. Toccata, http://members.optusnet.com.au/terryk/toccata.htm
9. Braille Music Editor, http://www.dodiesis.com