My sax teacher and I came to a kind of breakthrough recently in my long, long battle with sight reading: He put a business card over the measure I just played, moved it along as I played, and all of a sudden things became a lot less visually confusing.
Question: Is there any music application (Mac compatible, hopefully) that will display a page of music in a similar way?
I only have 2 hands, both of which are needed for saxophoning, and I can’t have my teacher come over and move a card across the page every time I practice.
I’ve done exactly this with pupils before. However, I’d never considered that there might be an application which would do the job. And I suspect there isn’t. AFAIK it’s not a feature of major packages such as SmartMusic, which is not surprising, as there’s myriad ways of tackling sightreading - with other kids, covering up the upcoming measure has helped them focus on the here-and-now aspect.
Trouble is, any software would have to do one of several things: take the music you want to use for sightreading practice, and use the scanned image to provide the visualisation you require, or use a library of licenced music a la SmartMusic. Or, in theory, build up an open source repository of sightreading material. The first of these is perhaps the most viable, but I don’t think the software exists.
If would be good if it did, though. (And I might be entirely wrong at any point, too.)
Notation programs can play a piece and move a marker from bar to bar as they do, even turn virtual pages. No reason they couldn’t move a black box over the preceding, or succeeding, measure.
Of course, notation programs assume a near-pro level of sight reading. :smack: No bucking the system, I suppose.
Of course, you’re quite right. So the basic answer to the question is ‘no, there’s no software that would do this, even though it wouldn’t involve any capabilities that aren’t present in current software’. I was jumping ahead to the next problem, which is the practicalities of where the appropriate musical material, in the appropriate electronic format, would come from.
Smartmusic, and perhaps other software too, will follow your tempo.