A low cost computing interface to speed up braille music notation

Abstract

Braille music notation is used by visually impaired musicians to engrave music. As normally performed, this is a difficult and time consuming task. This paper presents a study, a work in progress, on the design of a simple and affordable hardware interface that turns the process of braille music notation in computers easier and faster. Braille uses the same set of 6 dots to make all representations of letters, numbers, symbols and music notation according a context. The hardware presented here has two handles with 3 pushbuttons, each one related to one braille dot. An Arduino board reads the state of these 6 pushbuttons, translate them into a bitmask and send it to a computer. At the computer side there is a driver to make it possible to convert pushbuttons actions into image and sound.