Look Ma, No Hands: Turn Sheet Music With a Nod Using PiaScore App

PiaScore is an interesting application from Japan which allows you to view digital sheet music on your iPad. But even more than just that, it is enabled with gestures which allow you to turn pages with either a wave of your hand or nod of your head.

That’s a very clever way of using the camera as an interface, since your hands are obviously occupied playing the piano, so being able to nod your head to the left or right is a handy way to flip pages. If you’d like someone to turn the pages for you, that can be done as well via the PiaScoreAir iPhone application which connects to your iPad via bluetooth.

In addition, just recently PiaScore pushed an update which enabled the feature called Cloud Play. This gives users access to a number of public domain sheet music files which come courtesy of the International Music Score Library Project, or IMSLP. The developer also recently announced a partnership with the Piano Teachers’ National Association of Japan which has made more music sheets available for download or purchase as well. So for musicians who are tired of carrying around folders full of sheet music, being able to cram thousands of musical pieces into a single device is a big plus.

The app is developed by Plusadd, a startup which was established in 2010 and has been solely working on this app. It’s CEO is Hiroyuki Koike who is both a software developer and an amateur pianist, and thus in a unique position to create such an application. Since it was first released in late 2010, the app has seen more than 45,000 downloads worldwide, with about half of those coming from Japan.

PiaScore is free, but the company is considering possible business models for the future, and might sell digital sheet music in-app in the future.

Admittedly the iPad might be a little small for reading sheet music from, but the advantages of an app like this are very clear. You can check out a demo of the app in use in the video below, and if you’d like to try PiaScore for yourself, you can get it from the app store.