Resonare is a textual editor to process Braille music texts and it is meant for sighted users, such as Braille transcribers or teachers.

This programme is able to:

• open a Braille music file in ASCII format.
• recognise automatically score symbols.
• do semantic elaboration of the recognised symbols.
• produce a BMML file.

Resonare is a special editor allowing the operator to import an ASCII file corresponding to a Braille score, to interpret it, and to output a BMML file and it can be considered as “intelligent recognition software for Braille music”. The software uses a principle analogous to normal “literary” recognition programmes. Indeed, normal optical recognition software accepts an image of a given page (a picture), and produces words and punctuations corresponding to the page, like a human reader does. Similarly, Resonare accepts ASCII characters, corresponding to a Braille music page, and produces a sequence of meaningful objects, which can be further processed; the user can listen to it, analyse it, extract parts, slow down chords, and so on. Exactly like words and punctuation, it can be edited further with a commercial editor. In other words, Resonare, starting from an ASCII file, recognises each symbol and contextualises it, following a set of specific rules of Braille music notation.

Beyond this, this programme is much more than a simple Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Braille music. It can be considered as a “function recogniser”. Specifically, Resonare identifies not only the meaning of each symbol, but also its syntactical function in the given score. Referring to the “literary” OCR metaphor, Resonare recognises nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, and so on, contained in a sentence. Resonare is closely related to “Braille Music Reader” and produces a structured file in BMML format, whereas Braille Music Reader allows blind users to browse and, to some extent, to manipulate the BMXML file resulting from Resonare. The Contrapunctus Consortium believe that the Resonare editor, along with Braille Music Reader browser, encourages greater use of Braille music among visually impaired professionals as well as amateurs. It will make crucial tasks, such as memorising, analysing, annotating and manipulating, connected with music learning and performance easier.

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