From Engadget:
“If you carry your sheet music in a laptop, AirTurn’s got a USB dongle for that, but if you’ve migrated your musical cues to an certain slate, never fear, Bluetooth is on the way. The AirTurn BT-105 will bring the company’s page turning technology to iPad, using a transmitter that attaches to standard professional footswitches, allowing you to turn full pages and half pages of sheet music while keeping hands firmly affixed to your instrument. Though there’s no word on price, we imagine it’ll cost close to the existing 2.4GHz version, which runs from $40 for a dongle to $100 for a package with two Boss pedals, and when it surfaces in Q4 of this year, we’re hoping it will extend bicycling input to all the other wild and crazy apps you dream up. PR and video after the break. “
Opens up a LOT of doors. For what it is worth, I have put a lot of stuff I practice on to my iPad, and it works great.
Interesting – but still not a very big step forward from sheet music. And it seems like jumping to repeats of segno/coda parts would be annoying.
I wonder if this concept could be taken a few steps further – for example: the ipad has a microphone. Why not add some beat/speed recognition and have the music scroll by automatically? (of course you need to be able to override that and correct/steer it a bit, but still).
And when a repeat/coda comes: why not display both of the options (repeat or continue) side-by-side for a while, highlighting the one that is most likely the one you want?
On the other hand, the ipad is still a bit small compared to a real sheet. Adding ‘interesting’ features will also mean there’s less space for the rest, making it harder to get an ‘overview’ of the piece.
On the other hand there’s interesting possibilities there too: you could fit in much more by making the ‘current’ bars large, and ‘zoom out’ bars that are further away. That way perhaps you could fit more on one page.
Also, one thing that annoys me about most sheet music is that it obscures the structure of the song: if there is a ‘AABACABA’ structure, this is hard to see by just looking at the sheet music. Perhaps on a more ‘dynamic’ medium like an ipad we could make this more visible: if nothing else, a sort of ‘birds-eye song roadmap’ in a corner showing the structure of the song and the current location could be a nice help, and an interesting way to navigate the sheet, too.