Wednesday, 10 October 2012

NextScore



A while ago my brother put on some music after dinner.  "Who?" he asked me.

"Ashkenazy," I said.

"Correct.  Page turner?" he asked...

Of course it was terrible musical snobbery for us both to know implicitly that he was asking for the performer and not the composer (Chopin, as it happened).  And his subsequent question made me laugh for a long time.  Perhaps we had drunk too much wine.

But every musician needs a page turner, or there is that annoying half-second pause as one hand flies from the keys to flip.

There are, of course, page turner apps.  But as far as I can see they all rely on foot pedals.

However tablets have microphones.  It can't be hard to write a program that analyses the sound stream, matches it to a score, and then turns the page automatically...