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...
4 comments:
Hi Mr. Bowyer,
Here in Ghent (you came to give a talk once at the Univerity College on my invitation) there is a company - samplesumo - that does exactly that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-drxPaNuZA
http://samplesumo.com/
http://www.samplesumo.com/music-following
They are a spin-off from the IPEM where they do all kinds of cool stuff:
http://www.ipem.ugent.be/?q=node/57
my personal favorite: http://www.ipem.ugent.be/node/445/
Feel free to mail me if you want contact with one of those: batist.leman at gmail.com
Best regards,
Batist
Hi Batist,
Good to hear from you. And I see (as my blog heading admits...) that I have not done enough detailed research :-)
IPAd also have camera and face recognition. why not an eye-look-the-cameara-blink sensor for page change???
I think Jean Pierre is on the right track (excuse the pun). My fiancée, who is a professional classical musician, informs me that the point she wants the page turned varies, mainly according to how well she knows the piece, and how technically complex it is. So linking the page turn to the music misses out a few key variables; better, perhaps, to have manual intervention :)
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