Feeling the music: Braille Music

Michael House's 2017 documentary Braille Music is a film about music that just happens to feature exclusively blind musicians. Braille's story is told, starting from its origins in 18th-century Paris and finishing with the recording of a new piece of music, written, learnt and rehearsed in braille. My involvement in the film's production led me on my own journey of discovery and has deepened my appreciation of Braille the person and his ongoing legacy for blind musicians.

By the time Louis Braille was working on his music code in the 1830s, stave notation was already highly sophisticated. The 19th century saw composers increasingly eager to capture and prescribe on the stave every nuance of performance. Yet the musical world of Louis Braille was, by our contemporary standards, rather conservative. Braille's system has undergone refinement and expansion to cater for modern notation conventions, but the fundamentals remain largely unaltered. Braille's inner logic and portability have made it ideally suited to the digital age.