The role of positional knowledge and tonal approaches in cellists’ sight-reading

Abstract

Sight-reading is an important skill for amateur and professional musicians. Several factors seem to play a role in sight-reading skills, such as expertise level, ear training, mental speed and improvisation skills. If we are right in supposing that these factors cannot easily be generalized for all musicians, one of the reasons for this must surely lie in the fact that different musical instruments set different technical requirements for the player. The purpose of this study was to investigate which factors help cello students have better sight-reading abilities. Amateur cello students ( N = 79) were tested for position knowledge, use of tonal and positional approaches and actual sight-reading ability, and their sight-reading performance was measured by counting pitch and fluency errors they made in short pieces of varying complexity. This study used a partly correlational (use of tonal/positional approaches, technical level, experience, and position knowledge) and a partly experimental repeated-measures design (key complexity). The findings suggest that position knowledge shows a very strong negative correlation with the number of sight-reading errors and a weak correlation with pauses. Use of positional approaches shows no significantly stronger correlation with the number of sight-reading errors than the use of tonal approaches. In addition, it appears that an increase in the key complexity leads to more sight-reading errors and more pauses. Finally, the position knowledge and technical level of participants explain 83% of the variation in the total pitch errors. Experience and use of tonal approaches explain 40% of the variation in the number of short pauses.

Lectura a Primera Vista en Clase Instrumental: Experiencias de Docentes y Estudiantes

“…LPV, basándose en su experiencia y en la experimentación durante las clases (Burwell, 2012;Daniel y Parkes, 2017;Gaunt, 2008;Lehmann y McArthur, 2002;Karlsson y Juslin, 2008;Simones, 2015). Casi todos los docentes adaptaron las estrategias a las dificultades de cada estudiante (Mishra, 2014(Mishra, , 2015 y a las características de sus instrumentos (Wolfz, Boshuizen y van Strien, 2018;Wurtz, Mueri y Wiesendanger, 2009). Aunque en casi todas las clases se empleó el análisis armónico, en ninguna se contextualizó con el periodo histórico o estilo para favorecer el desarrollo de expectativas (Wristen, 2005;Zhukov et al, 2016).…”

“…Findings also suggest that effective sight-reading strategies in the different musical instruments are necessary, but it is also essential to explore its applicability in real contexts and, above all, to favor a well-rounded instrumental music education. bles a otros instrumentos musicales (Wristen, 2005), varios investigadores consideran que es necesario entender las dificultades propias de cada uno durante la LPV para desarrollar enfoques pedagógicos adecuados (Wurtz, Mueri y Wiesendanger, 2009;Wolfs, Boshuizen y van Strien, 2018). Asimismo, aunque existen numerosos estudios sobre los procesos cognitivos involucrados en la LPV, pocas estrategias pedagógicas cuentan con suficiente respaldo empírico que sustenten su efectividad (Mishra, 2014;Wristen, 2005;Zhukov, 2016;Zhukov et al, 2016).…”

Experiential and Cognitive Predictors of Sight-Singing Performance in Music Higher Education

“…Furthermore, participants with more years of musical experience tend to have better cross-modal integration abilities (i.e., improved audiovisual processing; Drai-Zerbib & Baccino, 2014 , 2018 ; Drai-Zerbib et al, 2012 ), which could facilitate the execution of sight-singing tasks. Therefore, it is not surprising that, as Wolfs et al (2020) observed, experience is a significant predictor of sight-reading performance among cellists, and according to Fournier (2020) , musical experience is correlated to aural skills performance when combining musical dictation and sight-singing scores. Consequently, it seems plausible that students who begin their postsecondary music education with more musical experience and a more extensive background in music reading should also be better at sight-singing.…”

A potential questionnaire for probing students self-efficacy and self-regulation processes in music sight-reading

“…Music sight-reading (MSR) is considered as important functional skill in Western musical domains that deals with several factors, including level of expertise, aural training, auditory imagery, mental and psychomotor, and improvisation skills (Wolfs, Henny and Strien 2018;Houghton 2018) among others. This skill is required in formal situations such institutional music examinations tests or orchestral entrance competitions involving therefore complex simultaneous tasks regarding visual, auditory and motor processing (Karacharova and Khmelnitskaya 2018;Fireman 2008).…”