Friday, April 27, 2007

Brave new world

Having been inspired by Mr. Sung, I'm already fast at work on trying out the virtual sheet music thing. No, I haven't bought my own Tablet PC yet, but I realized how easy it is to fold a laptop out flat, rotate an image in Acrobat and set the 'music' up on my piano. I played through Jenkinson's Elves' Dance with my daughter a couple of times, but I did have to flip my hand up to change the pages.

I'm already seriously thinking of trying this out when I perform a student composer's piano piece in a recital tomorrow night. However, there's one spot in the piece that really could use a page-turning pedal of some sort. (Having a human page-turner up there would just ruin it, of course.) I actually have a little programmable USB mouse that would work - if I'm wearing only socks. This mouse works well because the entire body acts as a programmable button (PageDown, in this case) when pushed down from either the left or right side. (No fussing with tiny click buttons.) I'm just not sure I could feel it with shoes on, but I haven't actually tried yet.

I also have the composer's score in Finale, so I've played around a bit with reformatting the page-turning problem a way, but I haven't found a solution. Also, I'm not really playing the piece all that well right now, so perhaps I should go practice it!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Regarding the mouse button, if you can get your hands on a Wii and rewire the thing so it links to a mouse button, you can pretty much stick out your tongue (or shake your head, or flap your arms) and have that translated as a button push.

On the other hand, note also the number of physical injuries due to playing Wii (just google for "Wii injuries").