B-Flat
Flattens a sheet music pdf into one really long png so it can be viewed on a phone.
Example input: Madeon - Shelter.pdf and output: Madeon - Shelter-flattened.png
Caveat: I wrote all of this code originally in August 2021, and moved it to this repo in 2022. I did some refactoring in 2022, but it's still not representative of my best work.
Usage
- Install Python
- python -m venv venv
- activate the venv (depends on your OS)
- pip install -r requirements.txt
- python main.py
- Select your sheet music pdf file
- Crop the left and right sides with the windows that pop up to remove whitespace, clefs, and optionally time signature/key signature The left and right cropping amount chosen here will propogate to the rest of the sheet music.
- A really long image will be output that can be sent to your phone to use with an autoscrolling app.
Problem statement
As far as I'm aware, there's no app that lets you easily play from sheet music on a cell phone.
Most sheet music apps are geared towards having a tablet, but I'm not going to bring my tablet around all the time, whereas I'll always have my phone on me when I happen upon a piano, and of course, not everyone has a tablet.
Solution (kind of)
Since there are autoscrolling apps on the market (and I made my own), I figured that the best way to view sheet music on a phone would be to flatten it into a single staff, and play it on an autoscrolling app.
The reason this is only kind of a solution is that scrolling at a set speed isn't perfect for sheet music.
The tempo can change, and the spacing between notes can also change during a piece. Without the ability to change the scrolling speed during the performance, this makes it pretty hard to read the sheet music at a single speed.
One idea is to encode the scrolling speed as maybe a grayscale 0-255 value at the edge of the sheet music picture, but I haven't thought of a satisfying way for a user to generate this without a lot of manual work, and of course the scrolling app would need to interpret this encoding too.