Flip your tablature/music page with a smirk!

A year or so ago, I posted a blog article about replacing paper with electronic charts using an Apple iPad, combined with the forScore app bluetoothed to a PageFlip DragonFly foot pedal. The pedal enabled page flipping for a multi-page tune. I use all this tech because I play a lot of country blues tunes, but simply cannot memorize them. While I develop finger-muscle memory for the tunes, it is necessary for me to have the chart as a cue when playing.

In sum, with an iPad Air, a mic stand, a Hercules tablet holder, and finally, a DragonFly foot pedal, I replaced an ungainly, non portable music stand and sloppy, wrinkly, taped together hard paper music charts that flopped all over the place. How did it work out over time? Good, but after a while, I wished I’d purchased the larger, more expensive iPad Pro to make reading the music easier (the Pro screen actually projects a size equivalent to single standard 8×10″ page in a paper chart). Still, I made the investment in the smallish iPad Air and was initially loath to waste money by trading it in, much as I wanted to.

It’s important to note too that while the foot pedal functioned properly most of the time, I found it a challenge sometimes to stay focused on the music and simultaneously stab my foot out to find the proper forward shift pedal and avoid going accidentally backwards. Furthermore, the pedal would go to sleep when not in use for an extended period of time, and required multiple stomps to wake it back up, which was frustrating when immersed in the middle of a tune. Finally, the “in-screen” keyboard on the iPad was disabled by the pedal when active, which made typing annotations onto the music chart impossible.

Then, one day I was annotating a country blues chart and did a web search to see if it was possible to cut and paste lyrics or move a music bar to another location while using forScore. After finding online instructions for how to execute that capability and then fumbling around for an extended period of time trying to accomplish a simple cut and paste, I finally discovered that you had to be a member of forScore Pro to access that feature!

forScore Pro is similar to one of those patreon accounts that are so popular now for financially supporting online activities. For an additional small annual fee, you get added features like cut and paste and also support future improvements for the app. I joined because cut and paste is a very, very useful feature to arrange and annotate a chart. You also get occasional new update notes from forScore as a Pro member.

What I soon discovered after joining forScore Pro was that the 2020 iPad Pro equipped with their True Depth Camera technology, combined with the latest iOS 14 operating system would allow page changing within forScore with facial gestures! This is the same highly sophisticated technology that allows a person to log into an iPhone or iPad with facial recognition.

The enhancements offered by the new iPad Pro were enough to push me over the edge. I wanted a larger surface area to see the charts and I was really interested in using facial gestures to replace the foot pedal! So, easy as pie, I arranged a trade-in for my year-old iPad Air and ordered a 12.9 inch iPad Pro. When the new iPad arrived, I transferred forScore and my music library over to it in short order.

I found out right away that my existing iPad mic stand holder no longer worked with the 12.9″ iPad. I owned a Hercules holder (lower right) and really liked it as it was very stable and easy to get the iPad in and out of the holder, but sadly it does not open wide enough to easily get the larger iPad Pro into the grips. So, after searching around I found a “decent” holder manufactured by Caddy Buddy (lower left). It’s good enough, but I still would prefer the Hercules device for ease of getting the iPad in and out of it and it’s more robust in construction. It would be a relatively easy design change to fix the Hercules device, but I see no evidence that the manufacturer is planning to do so.

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Once the iPad is mounted in the mic stand at roughly the same level as your face, it can then be set-up via forScore to activate facial gestures to turn pages in a musical chart. As a reminder, you cannot access this feature in the settings menu unless you are a Pro subscription member (lower left). Inside the Pro settings (lower center) you can access Face Gestures and activate a calibration procedure for facial recognition purposes.

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You have two face gesture choices, which are “turning your head” or “moving your mouth” in a kind of smirk to the left or right. I hoped that one of the gestures would have been a head tilt, but that was not available, and when I queried the forScore people about adding that feature they demurred. Head turning made little sense to me because you have to take your eyes off the music, and to be frank, I could never get it to work reliably.

On the other hand, lip/mouth movement does work! After calibrating the iPad to recognize you with 1) a relaxed face, 2) lips moved right, and 3) lips moved left the device will flip pages on command. In the upper right image you can see that there are sliders also available to fine tune sensitivity. There’s also a test protocol to see how well you’ve tuned sensitivity by ease of moving small blue dots on the screen by shifting your lips.

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So… How does it work???

For the most part it works pretty well; however, I do have some concerns with over sensitivity of the device. Sometimes, for reasons unknown to me, the page will flip without command. If you reduce sensitivity with the calibration slider to much to avoid phantom page flips, then you must really wrench your face to flip a page, which is distracting to you and an audience. Consequently, it takes time to fine tune the system’s sensitivity to your facial movements. I have some concern that changes in ambient lighting may also affect the reliability of the page flip. Also, I play sitting down and am concerned about seat height variation from home to perhaps a coffee shop open mic stage seat also affecting page flip accuracy. Finally, on occasion when I am playing for someone I will miss a note, then grimace at the pain of musical failure, and at that moment the device will sometimes respond to my dismay by flipping the page on its own, which makes matters all the worse.

In conclusion, the iPad Pro combined with forScore Pro is a keeper… I really like the larger surface area for viewing a musical chart and the cut and paste option for annotation is a great addition to the app. As far as page flipping goes, I am intent on working with the facial gesture feature, but will probably keep the foot pedal on standby to reverse unwanted spontaneously flips. There you have it…

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