gbScroller - Vertical to Horizontal Music Converter

[Gary Beene]

From talking with a friend, I got the idea of writing a tool to convert music sheets from a portrait format to a scrollable, horizontal format.  I went looking on the web, thinking there must be one already, but did not find anything.  I have the basics working, but before I spent more time on it, I thought I'd see if anyone here knows of such a thing.

Here's an image showing the idea.  A vertical page of music, with multiple rows of content, would be converted to a horizontal image that can be scrolled at a specified rate.  There might be several pages to convert.



My approach is to have a transparent, resizable dialog that the user places over a row of music and takes a snapshot of that row, then moves the dialog over the next row of music and takes another snapshot - repeating until all rows over multiple pages have been captured. All images would be the same size. gbScroller would merge the images into a single image, which could then be displayed and scrolled within the same app.

[Gary Beene]

A really smart guy might be able to have the program automatically separate the page into images. I'll have to think on that.

In the example above, the vertical delimiter is simply empty lines. That might be enough to allow easy separation of content.

But, I'd want the images that are merged to be the same size and to vertically line up adjacent images.

[Jules Marchildon]

I'm not the "really smart guy" you seek, but I found out Adobe has an auto scroll feature built in. You can also set to full screen, hot key to auto scroll then use the 1-9 keys to set the scroll rate. I asked a couple of my music capable friends, they prefer top to bottom scrolling.

[George Bleck]

[ASSUMPTION AHEAD]
As with most things Gary is working on, I'd expect this is a related in some way to increase the visible size of the notation for his low vision users.

It would be much harder to increase the size with the standard top-to-bottom reading. Doing so would increase the size of individual measures, meaning less would fit per page (screen) width. This would require a much more complex  "word wrap" (measure wrap?) feature as you can't just break a measure in half and wrap the notes.

Breaking the music up into a single line of left-to-right scrolling music would allow them to be chained much more easily, with measures being scalable to a dramatically bigger size.
[/ASSUMPTION AHEAD]

As a pianist/keyboardist myself, one thing I will add (from a personal perspective) is that being able to see more of the music at once is import so you can "buffer" what's next in your brain. Being able to see only 2 measures of a 4 measure line at time (2x magnify), or worse 1 measure (4x magnify), would mean I'd have less of a "future look" for "buffering" purposes. Not a deal breaker, but also not ideal. As I am sighted, my opinion is extremely biased in that direction, as you would expect. If I had limited vision, but still wanted to tickle the ivories, my thoughts on the matter may "play out" differently (yes pun intended).

[Gary Beene]

Howdy, Jules!

Interesting that we both talked to music heads and their preferences are just the opposite!  I wonder how much your folks are influenced by how the music has always been vertical. 

Howdy, George!

Yes, it was a low vision person who made the suggestion that horizontal would work better for him and you're correct, that for a low vision person, the horizontal format would be easier to see after resizing than would some kind of vertical resizing, especially with some kind of wrapping.

I understand your buffer comment and I (non-musician) too would think that the context of the current notes would be helpful.  But, seeing it is the first requirement.

I hope to have a working version tomorrow for us to better evaluate.

[Dale Yarker]

I don't play, but
continuous automatic scrolling of staff from right to left
could keep hands on instrument.

[Dan Soper]

It's been a while since I used it, but I'm pretty sure MuseScore can already do all of this. If you really want to write your own solution, don't let me stop you, but when there's a cross-platform FOSS tool already out there....

[Gary Beene]

Howdy, Dan!

Thanks for the suggestion!

I'll look again, but what I read at their site was that the paper can be toggled between portrait and landscape, but I found nothing to indicate it was extract individual lines and rearrange those a one long horizontal line of music.

If I find differently, I'll post back here.

I did run across "ScanScore" which is supposed to be able to extract music sheets into an editable format.  I'll go look at that as well.

... added ... I sent ScanScore an email asking for clarification of how their app can display sheet music.