Reading ahead: Adult music students’ eye movements in temporally controlled performances of a children’s song

Abstract

In the present study, education majors minoring in music education (n = 24) and music performance majors (n =14) read and performed the original version and melodically altered versions of a simple melody in a given tempo. Eye movements during music reading and piano performances were recorded. Errorless trials were analyzed to explore the adjustments of visual processing in successful performances. The temporal length of the eye–hand span (time between gaze and the performed note) was typically around one second or less. A measure of gaze activity indicated that performers generally inspected two quarter-note areas between two metrical beat onsets. The performance majors operated with shorter fixation durations and applied larger eye–hand spans as well as greater gaze activity than education majors. The latter two measures were generally affected by unexpected melodic alterations and simple rhythmic patterns. The study manifests both the flexibility and limitations of the mechanisms of visual processing in temporally controlled music reading, addressing some of the everyday conceptions about sight-reading by means of systematic research.

Eye-Hand Span is not an Indicator of but a Strategy for Proficient Sight-Reading in Piano Performance

“…Participants who played faster were regarded as skilled sight-readers, and conclusions, such as that skilled sight-readers (equal to faster players) had a longer EHS, were drawn 8,11–16 . However, as already indicated in previous studies 10,17–19 , a problem associated with uncontrolled playing tempo across participants is that the EHS is supposedly longer when playing the same length of a sight-reading piece at a faster tempo. For example, Huovinen et al .…”

Learning on the job

“…This expertise effect has been noticed both in silent-reading tasks (Waters & Underwood, 1998;Penttinen, et al, 2013) and during-performance tasks. Considering the latter, experts' advanced skill has appeared both when more and less experienced musicians' performances differ in terms of performance tempo (Truitt, Clifton, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 1997;Gilman & Underwood, 2003;Penttinen & Huovinen, 2011) but also when all performances are alike in a temporal sense and in performance quality (Penttinen, Huovinen, & Ylitalo, 2015). The features of the music notation, too, play a role in the reading, though this side of the process has only rarely been studied and when it has been, often only on a very general level (Madell & Hébert, 2008;Puurtinen, 2018).…”

“…Thus, musicians have to make sense of the complex symbolic system and select what to target their gaze at, as well as when and for how long, in order to perform successfully while operating within the given temporal framework. We know that musicians manage this by maintaining their gaze slightly ahead of the current point of performance, and with the help of this buffer (typically of perhaps around 1-2 seconds [Furneaux & Land, 1999;Penttinen, et al, 2015;Huovinen, Ylitalo, & Puurtinen, 2018;Rosemann, Altenmüller, & Fahle, 2016; see Video 1]), the performer prepares for the upcoming motoric responses. The gaze may typically tend to remain very close to the performed notes (Truitt et al, 1997;Penttinen, et al, 2015), but instead of a steady "looking ahead", at least for skilled music readers, the reading may also consist (mainly or in part) of rapid back and forth eye movements (Goolsby, 1994;cf.…”

“…Both computers were operated by the first author, who coordinated the change of slides on the eye tracker monitor so that they occurred at metronome beats. This procedure provided both the eye tracking and MIDI data streams with simultaneous events, and we created a laborious way to synchronize the data streams based on these markers (for details, see Penttinen, et al, 2015). This enabled us to calculate what we called the eye-hand span, that is, how much the gaze was ahead of the onset of a performed note (see Figure 3).…”

“…For the analyses, we used t-and Chi-square tests and were fairly content with our protocols for data collection and analyses -for a while. Our first full-paper submission was not successful, but the second one was (Penttinen, Huovinen, & Ylitalo, unpublished manuscript;Penttinen, et al, 2015).…”