Investigating Page Turning Methods for Sheet Music during Piano Play

Abstract

Musical pieces composed for the piano are registered on paper sheets. Since the space for sheets on the piano is limited, pianists have to turn pages while playing the piano to get access to the registered without having to stop playing. In this work, we present two methods to support page turning during piano play: 1) turning by touch and 2) turning by pedal in combination with two types of note layouts in (1) DIN A4 and (2) an adaptive display size. We compared these page turning methods to the baseline of using paper pages with 10 participants in a controlled lab experiment. Our results show that the pedal-adaptive turning method leads to the lowest interruption time while playing and pedal-based methods have a high usability and low cognitive load.