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Eye movement in music reading refers to the ways in which musicians' eyes move over a musical score as they it is read. The phenomenon has been studied by researchers from a range of backgrounds, including cognitive psychology and music education. These studies have typically reflected a curiosity among performing musicians about a central process in their art, and a hope that investigating eye movement might help in the development of more effective methods of training musicians' sight reading skills.

Music reading may at first appear to be similar to language reading, since in both activities the eyes move over the page in fixations and saccades, picking up and processing coded meanings. However, it is here that the obvious similarities end. Not only is music's coding system nonlinguistic, it involves what is apparently a unique combination of features among human activities: a strict and continuous time contraint on an output that is generated by a continuous stream of coded instructions. Even the reading of language aloud, which, like musical performance involves turning coded information into a musculoskeletal response, is relatively free of temporal constraint—the pulse in reading aloud is a fluid, improvised affair compared with its rigid presence in most Western music. It is this uniquely strict temporal requirement in musical performance that has made the observation of eye movement in music reading fraught with more difficulties and pitfalls than that of eye movement in language reading.

Another critical difference between reading music and reading language is the role of skill. Most people become reasonably efficient at language reading by adulthood, even though almost all language reading is sight reading. By contrast, some musicians regard themselves as poor sight readers of music even after years of study. Thus, the improvement of music sight reading and the differences between skilled and unskilled readers have always been of prime importance to research into eye movement in music reading, whereas research into eye movement in language reading has been more concerned with the development of of a unified psychological model of the reading process. It is therefore unsurprising that most research into eye movement in music reading has aimed to compare the eye movement patterns of the skilled and the unskilled.

Equipment and related methodology

The tempo/skill/action-slip fallacy

Fixations, pauses and the number–duration relationship

Tempo

Musical complexity

Reader skill

Stimulus familiarity

The top–down/bottom–up question

Peripheral visual input

Refixation

The eye–hand span

References

See also

1. Sloboda JA (1985) The musical mind: the cognitive pscyhology of music, Oxford: Clarendon Press
2. Rayner K, Flores D'Arcais GB, Balota DA (1990) "Comprehension processes in reading: final thoughts". In K Rayner, GB Flored d'Arcais, DA Balota (eds) Comprehension processes in reading, Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates