Preparation of Music Scores to Enable Hands-free Page Turning Based on Eye-gaze Tracking

Abstract

Digital copies of musical scores may be saved on tablet devices, compressing volumes of scores into a single portable device. Tablet screens are however typically smaller than printed sheet music such that the score needs to be resized for readability. This necessitates additional page turning which is made more complex when repeat instructions are used since these give rise to forward and backward page turns of the music. In this paper, we tackle this problem by first performing image analysis of the score in order to identify repeat instructions and hence flatten the score. Thus, the music player is presented the score as it should be played. We then propose the use of eye-gaze tracking to provide a hands-free page turning mechanism. Thus, the player remains in full control of when the page turn occurs. Through a preliminary study, we found that our proposed score flattening and eye-gaze page turning reduced the time spent navigating the page turns by 47% in comparison to available music score reading tools.