Turning Pages with Face Recognition

Nearly all of my sheet music is in PDF. I’m usually too lazy cheap environmentally friendly to print it out, and sadly there are only so many notes that can fit on a screen. My playing has typically been littered with impromptu rest measures caused by my reaching for the mouse to scroll down.

Last night I hacked together a little program that allows you to send PageUp and PageDown keypresses by tilting your head. It only supports Linux for now.

Installation

Make sure you have the required libraries.

# Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install libopencv-dev python-opencv

# Fedora:
sudo yum install opencv-devel opencv-python

Get the code.

git clone https://github.com/artnc/opencv-page-turner.git
cd opencv-page-turner

Run it!

python pageturner.py

Usage

Tilting your head to the left sends a PageUp keypress to the active window; tilting to the right sends PageDown. Run the program, open your sheet music in a PDF reader, and start playing.

Note that this page turner’s reliance on subtle head movements discourages physically expressive styles of play—sorry, Lang Lang.