Eye movement in music reading

[2] Eye movement in music reading is an extremely complex phenomenon that involves a number of unresolved issues in psychology, and which requires intricate experimental conditions to produce meaningful data.

Some studies used devices such as a headrest and bite-plate to minimise this contamination, with limited success, and in one case a camera affixed to a motorcycle helmet—weighing nearly 3 kg—which was supported by a system of counterbalancing weights and pulleys attached to the ceiling.

The musculoskeletal response required to play a musical instrument involves substantial body movement, usually of the hands, arms and torso.

Rayner & Pollatsek (1997:49) wrote that: Since Lang (1961), all reported studies into eye movement in music reading, aside from Smith (1988), appear to have used infrared tracking technology.

At a sufficiently slow tempo, players over a large range of skill-levels are capable of accurate performance, but the skilled will have excess capacity in their perception and processing of the information on the page.

Weaver (1943:15) implied the existence of the wandering effect and its confounding influence, as did Truitt et al. (1997:51), who suspected that at slow tempo their participants' eyes were "hanging around rather than extracting information".

Investigators have apparently attempted to overcome the consequences of the fallacy by making compromises, such as (1) exercising little or no control over the tempos at which participants performed in trials, and/or (2) tolerating significant disparity in the level of action slips between skilled and unskilled groups.

For example, visual complexity might be in the form of the density of the notational symbols on the page, or of the presence of accidentals, triplet signs, slurs and other expression markings.

[13] On balance, it appears likely that under controlled temporal conditions, denser and more complex music is associated with a higher number of fixations, of shorter mean duration.

Kinsler & Carpenter (1995) proposed a model for the processing of music notation, based on their data from the reading of rhythm patterns, in which an iconic representation of each fixated image is scanned by a 'processor' and interpreted to a given level of accuracy.

On the third encounter, mean fixation duration was higher for both groups (437 ms) but by a barely significant amount, thus mildly supporting York's earlier finding.

The tempo of MM120 suggested at the start of each of Goolsby's trials appears to be slow for tackling the given melodies, which contained many semibreves and minims, and there may have simply been insufficient pressure to produce significant results.

[17] (Smith's (1988) results, reinforced by those of Kinsler & Carpenter (1995), suggest that faster tempos are likely to reduce both the number and duration of fixations in the reading of a single-line melody.

Weaver was apparently unaware of the difficulty of proving this hypothesis in the light of the continual need to scan up and down between the staves and move forward along the score.

Noteheads, stems, beams, barlines and other notational symbols are all sufficiently bold and distinctive to be useful when picked up peripherally, even when at some distance from the fovea.

The upcoming pitch contour and prevailing rhythmic values of a musical line can typically be ascertained ahead of foveal perception.

In Weaver (1943:28), the eye–hand span varied greatly, but never exceeded 'a separation of eight successive notes or chords, a figure that seems impossibly large for the reading of keyboard scores.

Young (1971) found that both skilled and unskilled participants previewed about one chord ahead of their hands, an uncertain finding in view of the methodological problems in that study.

[26] Sloboda (1974, 1977) cleverly applied Levin & Kaplin's (1970) 'light-out' method in an experiment designed to measure the size of the span in music reading.

The participants were instructed to continue playing correctly 'without guessing' for as long as they could after visual input was effectively removed, giving an indication as to how far ahead of their hands they were perceiving at that moment.

They claimed that most music pedagogy supports the first aspect [in advising] the student that the eyes should be well ahead of the hands for effective sight reading.

Souter (2001) used novel theory and methodology to investigate the effects of tempo on key variables in the sight reading of highly skilled keyboardists.

In Souter's study, if a participant adapted to the doubling of tempo by using the same number of pauses and halving their mean duration, the reading would fall on the sole-contribution point (1.0,0.5).

Conversely, if a participant adapted by halving the number of pauses and maintaining their mean duration, the reading would fall on the other sole-contribution point (0.5,1.0).

However, numerous studies[28] have shown that scanpaths in the reading of a number of musical textures—including melody, four-part hymns, and counterpoint—are not predictable and orderly, but are inherently changeable, with a certain ragged, ad-hoc quality.

Music readers appear to turn their backs on the theoretical advantage of standardised scanpath: they are either flexible or ad hoc when it comes to the number of pauses—just as they are with respect to their pause durations—and do not scan a score in a strict, predetermined manner.

[29] This challenged the notion that scanpath (largely or solely) reflects the horizontal or vertical emphasis of the musical texture, as proposed by Sloboda (1985) and Weaver (1943), since these dimensions depend significantly on tempo.

Both logical inference and evidence in the literature point to the fact that there are three oculomotor imperatives in the task of eye movement in music reading.

The first imperative seems obvious: the eyes must maintain a pace across the page that is appropriate to the tempo of the music, and they do this by manipulating the number and durations of fixations, and thereby the scanpath across the score.

Eye movement thus embodies a fluid set of characteristics that are not only intimately engaged in engineering the optimal visual input to the apparatus, but in servicing the process of that information in the memory system.