Introduction and Project Summary
Flipping sheet music has been a headache for instrument players, especially when players play with both hands. Our group aims to build an automatic page-flipper for sheet music. It is assistive technology for instrument players looking for convenient hands-free page-flipping features during the practice/performance, and moreover, it can be helpful for players with disabilities who are challenged by the mechanics of page-flipping.
Although there exist multiple alternatives for handling sheet music on the market, none is considered user-friendly for instrument players in terms of price and utility. A basic desktop music stand usually sells for about 10-20 dollars on average, yet an advanced machine with page-turning features usually sells for at least around one hundred dollars. Since the page-flipping task varies under different scenarios, we focus our use case on keyboard players. In terms of the appearance design, we want our Page Flipper to have the look of a basic desktop music stand, which means that it’s light-weight and easily attachable to the keyboard. Other than the semi-intelligent solutions depending on user’s foot or button control, we want our product to be fully-intelligent, meaning that it should be able to recognize the player’s progress on the sheet music and decide when to flip the page itself without explicit user control.
Here comes our solution! The intelligent Music Page Flipper. You simply need to pick your sheet music, scan it with your phone, upload it on our webpage, and start playing. The automatic PageFlipper recognizes it when reaching the end measures of your sheet music, and flip the page for you. There is also a web counterpart if you prefer electronic sheet music. Similarly, after you upload it on our webpage, you can see the sheet music with a real-time tracker, showing your position on the page. Our program controls the scroll bar for you, adjusting the sheet music in view.