Notelesing

Denne boka er et forsøk på å se et av musikkundervisningens støttefag, hørelære, fra noen nye synsvinkler. Jeg har søkt å finne svar på spørsmål som dreier seg om hvordan vi leser noter, og hvorfor vi bruker gitte metoder i hørelærefaget for å trene opp et godt gehør. Hvorfor er det så viktig å synge? Hvordan leser vi egentlig noter? Kan teorier om språkopplæring gi oss noen svar på slike spørsmål? Mitt prosjekt i denne boka er først og fremst å sette søkelys på didaktiske problemstillinger i faget, og jeg håper dette arbeidet kan gi grunnlag for videre diskusjoner. Boka handler altså om hørelæremetodikk og er primært rettet mot lærere i faget, både ved høgskolene og MDD-linjene (Musikk-Dans-Drama) på videregående skoler. Jeg tror likevel at også instrumentalpedagoger kan ha nytte av noen av innfallsvinklene til det å lære å lese noter. Forhåpentligvis kan selve sammenligningen av musikk og språkdidaktikk gi inspirasjon til å tenke videre også om musikkundervisning generelt. Det er også mulig at språkpedagoger vil finne deler av boka interessant.

This chapter examines how the use of different notational conventions can shape musical perception and performance. Drawing on three case studies – of a musically gifted nineyear- old, of two gifted young violinists, and of a professional string quartet – it demonstrates how the rules and syntax of notation influence the process of musical communication.

This chapter discusses students’ ways of using cultural tools in aural-based and notationbased instrumental music lessons. It examines two teachers’ ways of working – one in a notation-based music environment, the other in an aural-based music environment – in order to illustrate the complex interplay between, and varying functions of, tools and artefacts such as notated (printed scores) and aural (performances) presentations of musical works. It considers the ways in which these teachers draw on their knowledge as culture bearers of the musical (Western classical music and Zimbabwean marimba ensemble respectively) and pedagogical (Suzuki piano instruction and aural-based group teaching) traditions within which they work, in order to use notated, aural, and embodied presentations of the music to prompt student thought and practical activity. In these environments, the teachers use student performances as cultural tools for reflection and understanding in their own learning as teachers, as well as that of their students. The chapter also illustrates the varying functions a musical instrument might play in students’ learning, as, for example, a mechanical tool for practising or experiencing specific aspects of technique, or as a cultural tool for the expression of musical meaning.

From a psychological viewpoint, sight-reading involves perception (decoding note patterns), kinesthetics (executing motor programs), memory (recognizing patterns), and problem-solving skills (improvising and guessing). Sight-reading skills seem to be highly trainable and differences in sight-reading ability can be explained through differences in the amount of relevant experience and the size of the knowledge base (e.g., repertoire). The ability to perform with little or no rehearsal may be regarded as a reconstructive activity that involves higher-level mental processes. These are primarily initiated by visual input but also by conceptual knowledge and specific expectations. This chapter discusses common problems in sight-reading of pitches, rhythm, articulation, and expression, and presents suggestions for their remediation through the use of technical equipment, practice of isolated parameters, and strategic preparations for playing.

In this chapter, we will briefly look at how music notation is perceived and then move on to analyze the skills involved in sight-reading while taking into account the real-time conditions under which it takes place. We will discuss the perceptual issues and aspects of memory and problem-solving. Finally, we will outline the developmental course of skill acquisition in sight-reading, keeping in mind the characteristic differences between novices and experts, and present a general outline of sight-reading performance.

This chapter focuses on strategies for sight-reading and improvising music. The abilities to read fluently at sight and improvise convincingly hold a curious and somewhat paradoxical status. On one hand, they are highly prized and seen as indicators of great musical ability. On the other, they are often regarded as natural gifts that one either possesses or does not. The chapter considers how these two skills share a common etiology, both in their use of similar mental processes (e.g., pattern recognition) and their generative, ‘online’ nature. In addition, it explores how these two tasks can be systematically enhanced through structured training and how the augmentation of generative musical abilities as such could actually provide new insight for improving other musical skills.

Reading music at sight is a complex skill, requiring the musician to perform pitch and rhythm simultaneously. Previous research has identified difficulty levels for pitch and rhythm skills for strings individually but not in combination. In this study, we sought to study possible relationships between pitch and rhythm tasks occurring concurrently. High school string players (N = 88) performed melodies with varying combinations of pitch and rhythm difficulty. Results indicated that pitch and rhythm skills retained their relative difficulty levels, regardless of the presence of other factors. Rhythmic success was related to pitch success. Rhythm accuracy without pitch success occurred least frequently. Pitch accuracy without rhythm success occurred most frequently. String players appeared to give priority to pitch over rhythm, performing pitch correctly at the expense of rhythmic accuracy. Implications for teaching include the necessity of emphasizing rhythmic continuity. Future research should explore the pitch and rhythm reading capabilities for other instrumentalists and string players with a vocal background, as well as exploring the ability to sight-read additional musical elements in conjunction with rhythm and pitch.

Reading music notation is not an easy skill to acquire and can take years of training to master. In addition, it is not strictly necessary to be able to read music to make music. Nevertheless, music teaching and learning in the West has traditionally centered around the skill of reading music. This study explored participants’ reasons for learning to read music and the reported benefits of this skill for musical activities. We developed an online questionnaire with open-ended questions to gather the views of 64 people, both music readers and non-readers, on their musical activities using or not using notated scores. Their responses were analyzed thematically. The analysis showed that participants believe that learning and engaging with music notation adds to their multisensory experience of music involving vision, sound, and action; that, compared to learning by ear, the visual aspects of notation support the quick learning and improved theoretical understanding of a musical work: and that the skill of reading music is valuable in the context of group music making. They also believe, however, that notation can inhibit expressive performance or improvisation, and non-readers believe that sound technologies can be used as an alternative to notation. Finally, reading music was seen by readers, but not non-readers, as integral to playing an instrument. This may reflect differences between the practices and genres of music favored by the two groups.

Examined the role of auditory and visual feedback during sight-reading (SR) of a short piece of piano music. 15 pianists were assigned to conditions of normal SR, SR when unable to view the keyboard, and SR without auditory feedback. Performances where visual feedback was unavailable resulted in a significantly increased number of adjacent note errors, suggesting that Ss used visual feedback to guide discrete hand movements over the keyboard, but that the degree to which it was relied on depended on the S’s familiarity with the SR situation. SR when auditory feedback was unavailable was indistinguishable from normal SR, both being superior to the no-visual feedback situation. Musical experience and SR ability helped Ss distinguish between errors that would and would not impede fluency.

I denne artikkelen drøftes spørsmål som: Hva slags forståelse behøver en noteleser, og i hvor stor grad bruker vi meningsaspektet som støtte til lesing av musikk?

Music reading and writing are regarded as useful skills for musicians in many genres. As a means to communicate, written music is a useful tool both for composers, musicians and musicologists. Discussions concerning whether music literacy can have negative consequences for musical expression, as well, to a large degree focus on the relationship between oral and written music. – In this article this relationship is discussed using perspectives from language literacy theories, anthropology and philosophy. Implications for music literacy didactics will be seen in the light of questions regarding the potential effects that music literacy has on cognition and consciousness.

This study investigated the mental representation of music notation. Notational audiation is the ability to internally “hear” the music one is reading before physically hearing it performed on an instrument. In earlier studies, the authors claimed that this process engages music imagery contingent on subvocal silent singing. This study refines the previously developed embedded melody task and further explores the phonatory nature of notational audiation with throat-audio and larynx-electromyography measurement. Experiment 1 corroborates previous findings and confirms that notational audiation is a process engaging kinesthetic-like covert excitation of the vocal folds linked to phonatory resources. Experiment 2 explores whether covert rehearsal with the mind’s voice also involves actual motor processing systems and suggests that the mental representation of music notation cues manual motor imagery. Experiment 3 verifies findings of both Experiments 1 and 2 with a sample of professional drummers. The study points to the profound reliance on phonatory and manual motor processing—a dual-route stratagem—used during music reading. Further implications concern the integration of auditory and motor imagery in the brain and cross-modal encoding of a unisensory input.

The purpose of this article is to articulate clear definitions of music literacy and text, explain what impact they may have on music education generally, and describe their application to day-to-day teaching. The broadened definitions are intended to unite music professionals’ understanding of music literacy and help them more clearly approach music literacy instruction while simultaneously fulfilling curricular expectations of administrators and other stakeholders. Specific benefits of the new definitions include (1) aiding conversations between music teachers and literacy administrators, (2) providing clarity in the examination of broad issues and general approaches in music education, and (3) enhancing clarity and effectiveness in day-to-day instructional planning and delivery.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships among sight-reading ability in the high school mixed chorus and selected variables in four categories: the school, the music curriculum, the chorus teacher, and the chorus students. Twenty high school select mixed choirs and chorus teachers participated in the study. Data were obtained through teacher and student questionnaires. A sight-reading test was administered and recorded at each of the 20 schools, and the performances were rated by five expert adjudicators. Based on the findings of this study, the factors that, in combination, best predict sight-reading ability are: the ethnic makeup of the school, a large percentage of choir students with a piano in their home, a rural school, an occasional use of rote procedures to teach music, a large percentage of choir students who participated in all-state chorus, a large proportion of choir students with experience playing a musical instrument, a large high school, and a chorus teacher who believes in the importance of sight-reading instruction in the high school chorus.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships among instrumental sight-reading ability and seven selected variables: (1) Technical Proficiency, (2) Rhythm Reading Ability, (3) Sight Singing Ability, (4) Cumulative Grade Point Average, (5) Cumulative Music Theory Grade Point Average, (6) Cumulative Performance Jury Grade Point Average, and (7) Major Instrument Grade Point Average. Thirty-two wind instrumentalists, selected at random from undergraduate music theory classes at the University of South Carolina, served as subjects. During the spring semester of 1980, the subjects took tests designed to measure their abilities in sight-reading, technical proficiency, sight singing, and rhythm reading. Data were collected from each student’ s permanent record regarding each of the other variables. The following conclusions were drawn: (1) A strong positive relationship exists between wind instrumentalists’ general sight-reading ability and the ability to sight-read rhythm patterns. (2) Rhythm-reading ability is the single best predictor of wind instrumentalists’ sight-reading scores. (3) Rhythm-reading ability and performance jury scores combine to make the best predictors of wind instrumentalists’ sight-reading performance scores.

The development of sight-reading ability among student musicians continues to be an important fundamental skill in instrumental music education. As stated by Gregory (1972), “A prime educational goal of any discipline is the development of an independent learner. In music, an obvious prerequisite to independence is the ability to sightread” (p. 462). Development of sight-reading skills can be jeopardized if all rehearsal time is devoted to preparation for performance. It is necessary for music educators to maintain an appropriate balance between the products and processes of music education. Karpinski (2000) suggested that there must be a balance between sight-reading and prepared music in rehearsals and recommended that the amount of prepared material “decline in inverse proportion to the amount of music offered up for sightreading” (p. 191). He claimed that “prepared materials should ultimately feed into the experience of sightreading, so that the process of reading music extemporaneously relies more and more on the informed mind of the skilled reader” (p. 191). There is a wealth of research on sight-reading that ranges from methods of instruction to examination of eye movements. In 1987, Stebleton completed a comprehensive review of the sight-reading literature, and there has been an abundance of research on the topic since that time. In the review of the literature offered here, I resume Stebleton’s research and examine selected studies from 1987 to the present. I selected studies for the review according to their relevance to teaching sight-reading and rhythmic reading to band students. After the literature review, I offer suggestions for applying the findings to current educational situations.

This study analyzed the music reading performances of 6—13-year-old piano students (N = 35) in their second year of piano study. The stimuli consisted of three piano pieces, systematically constructed to vary in terms of left-hand complexity and input simultaneity. The music reading performances were recorded digitally and a code of error analysis was constructed from the data. The effect of age on the types of errors made was investigated. The age differences found were in terms of error frequency, performance continuity, contour preservation, and stimulus complexity. The study sheds light on what may be typical music reading errors of piano students in their second year of study and suggests some trends of age-related development in music reading among piano students.

The purpose of this paper is to construct a comprehensive review of the research literature in the reading of western staff notation. Studies in music perception, music cognition, music education and music neurology are cited. The aim is to establish current knowledge in music reading acquisition and what is needed for further progress in this field of research. It is argued that the reading of staff notation is an important albeit neglected field in music education research. It is pointed out that research on music reading skill in adult experts is more advanced than research on music reading acquisition in childhood. In contrast, music reading acquisition most often occurs during the childhood years. The paper highlights what music reading instruction can learn from research and where future research may provide further advancements.

Strategies for memorising music change as expertise develops. Twenty-two professional freelance musicians and 55 novice musicians were interviewed regarding their approaches to memorisation. Strategy use was found to depend on the nature of the material to be memorised. There was also evidence of considerable individual diversity in preferred strategies, learning being based on combinations of automated aural, kinaesthetic, or visual strategies. The professionals also made deliberate attempts to assist the memorisation process by developing an understanding of the structure of the music through analysis and devising strategies to avoid confusion when passages were similar. To reduce anxiety related to performance several strategies were often adopted simultaneously.

The purpose of this study was to examine predictors of music sight-reading ability. The authors hypothesized that speed and accuracy of music sight-reading would be predicted by a combination of aural pattern discrimination, spatial-temporal reasoning, and technical proficiency. Participants (N = 70) were wind players in concert bands at a medium-sized university in the Midwest. In a regression analysis with music sight-reading as the criterion variable, aural-spatial patterning and technical proficiency explained 51% of the variance, F = 37.34, p < .0001. These results support previous research that suggested that auditory, visual, spatial, and kinesthetic activations occur in coordination when wind players sight-read music notation. The results of the regression analysis suggested that although aural-spatial skills and technical proficiency skills were orthogonal, or separate, they both were essential to the complex task of sight-reading.

In this exploratory, qualitative study, selected young musicians’ ways of taking musical meaning from notation were investigated. A socio-cultural theoretical perspective was applied, which means that relations between traditions and individuals were especially accounted for. From the results of the study, conclusions on functions of the printed score as a mediator of musical meaning were drawn, and a theory of instrumental training was developed. Two main approaches to music notation were found: a REPRODUCTIVE and an EXPLORATIVE APPROACH. In the REPRODUCTIVE APPROACH, the function of the printed score is that of an explicitly normative document, which prescribes how to play, and through which the performance is to be assessed. In the EXPLORATIVE APPROACH, the function is that of an invitation to seek out implicit meaning according to the musicians’ individual judgement, within a frame of agreed understanding in Western tonal music that they share with the composer. The conclusion was drawn, that strategies for coping with music notation, used in early levels of instrumental education, might strongly influence musicians in the long term, however skilled and experienced they may be. Teaching methods based on a REPRODUCTIVE APPROACH to the printed score may even prevent professional musicians from applying musical understanding developed later. Based on these results, a theory of instrumental teaching was developed, meaning that teacher’s attitudes towards students, as well as towards music notation, might either support or obstruct students’ development.

This study is an attempt to understand the relationship between musical achievement and learning-relevant variables in the young adult beginner in learning how to play the piano as a basis towards improving college-level beginning piano teaching. To examine the factors affecting the musical development of the young adult beginner, 20 undergraduate non-music majors (18-22 years) were observed. The 10-week instructional period consisted of two 40-minute lessons per week, taught by the researcher, on a one-to-one basis. The researcher designed the instructional programme and measurement tool used to teach and observe each type of three musical achievements (keyboard fluency, music reading, and interpretation) independently. No evidence was found in support of stereotypical assumptions in the beginning piano study-related literature that the young adults have problems related to physical capacity in the acquisition of technique. It was found that learning-related characteristics in the class (motivation to learn, learning attitude and emotional factors) played an important role in the development of keyboard fluency compared with selection variables (physical capacity, intelligence and musical background). In addition, it appears that intelligence was significantly correlated with music reading, and musical background was substantially associated with interpretation. These findings indicate that the teacher should provide mixed materials, cognitive and affective experience according to the nature of learning.

This study investigates the relationship between selected predictors of achievement in playing unrehearsed music (sight reading) and the changing complexity of sight reading tasks. The question under investigation is, how different variables gain or lose significance as sight reading stimuli become more difficult. Fifty-two piano major graduates and undergraduates took part in an experiment which consisted of five different levels of sight reading complexity. Predictor variables were divided into three categories: (i) general cognitive skills (e.g. working memory capacity); (ii) elementary cognitive skills (e.g. reaction time); and (iii) expertise-related skills (e.g. accumulated sight reading or inner hearing). Regression analyses indicate that when sight reading stimuli is easy, general pianistic expertise is sufficient to be able to excel. However, with increasing task difficulty, psychomotor speed (as indicated by trilling speed), speed of information processing, inner hearing and sight reading expertise become more important. When sight reading complexity reaches its highest level, sight reading expertise still remains important, but psychomotor speed becomes the dominant predictor. Results indicate (i) that psychomotor speed and speed of information processing have a ‘bottleneck’ function and (ii) that there is a critical time window up to the age of 15 when sight reading expertise has to be acquired. It is concluded that with increasing task demands, sight reading ability is determined by both practice dependent skills and skills which are also assumed to be limited by innate abilities such as psychomotor movement speed. Thus we explain sight reading achievement as the result of specific combinations of different categories of skills which change with the demands of a task.

Music reading skills are acknowledged as essential for musicians when learning new pieces, accompanying, or playing with others in ensembles. Approaches to teaching beginners may be divided into rote, with new pieces learnt by ear and /or finger positions, and note, where students learn to read from conventional music notation from the earliest lessons. This study set out to examine relationships between first methods of learning musical instruments and outcome measures of subsequent music reading skills, participation in music ensembles, and ability to play music by ear. A self-administered online questionnaire collected data regarding the musical background of volunteer adult participants, and included a two-part music reading task. This was comprised of 24 audio-visual matching tasks using sets of four 2-bar melodies requiring either matching the scored melody to one of four recorded melodies, or matching a recorded melody to one of four scored melodies. Over a period of 52 days, 155 responses to the questionnaire were recorded, of which 118 (76%) were analyzed using a series of one-way analyses of variance. Results supported the hypothesis that the first method of instruction affected subsequent music reading ability, with note methods resulting in higher reading abilities than rote. Furthermore, a significant relationship emerged between music reading ability and ensemble participation, and a significant effect was found for playing by ear on music reading ability.

This article addresses the silent reading of music notation, combining eye-movement measures with a semantic analysis of readers’ verbal descriptions of the notated music. A group of musical novices (n = 16) and two groups of musical amateurs (less experienced n = 11 and more experienced n = 10) participated in three separate measurement sessions during a nine-month-long university music course designed for future primary-school teachers. In each session they viewed a notated folk song for 30 s and then described what they had seen. Greater musical experience was found to be connected with shorter fixation durations, more linear scanning of the notated music, and more accurate and integrative verbal descriptions. Repeated measurements during the course were connected to more accurate and integrative descriptions as well as the use of longer saccades for all participants. A cluster analysis of the results revealed three separate silent-reading styles: elementary processors, lacking in both accuracy and integration in their verbal reports; accurate analyzers, producing accurate but non-integrative descriptions; and accurate integrators who, besides accurate and integrative descriptions, showed a tendency of using shorter fixation times than the two other groups. The results are discussed with a view to visual processes in other domains. In addition, a question is raised whether educational programs tend to unduly neglect considering music notation as a source of information beyond its role as a performance aid.

Sight-reading is a skill required by musicians when they perform sheet music unknown to them. It demands sequential anticipatory eye fixation of notes immediately followed by motor execution. The distance between eye (fixation of a note) and hand position (tapping the corresponding key) is called eye-hand span (EHS). The aim of our study was to investigate the influence of practice, playing tempo and complexity of the music on the size of the EHS, as well as its relation to performance and cognitive skills (shape recognition, working memory, and mental speed). We used a sight-reading paradigm where nine pianists accompanied a pre-recorded flute voice, which also served as a time-keeper. After a practice phase, a second measurement of the EHS with same tempo and a third and fourth measurement with a different playing tempo followed. We found that the practice phase only slightly affected the EHS but that the EHS significantly changed according to playing tempo and complexity of the music. Furthermore the EHS correlated with quality of performance after practice and mental speed skills. Hence we conclude that the EHS seems to be characteristic for each musician, is developed over years of practice and is relatively independent of a short practice phase.

We used a novel musical Stroop task to demonstrate that musical notation is automatically processed in trained pianists. Numbers were superimposed onto musical notes, and participants played five-note sequences by mapping from numbers to fingers instead of from notes to fingers. Pianists’ reaction times were significantly affected by the congruence of the note/number pairing. Nonmusicians were unaffected. In a nonmusical analogue of the task, pianists and nonmusicians showed a qualitative difference on performance of a vertical-to-horizontal stimulus-response mapping task. Pianists were faster when stimuli specifying a leftward response were presented in vertically lower locations and stimuli specifying a rightward response were presented in vertically higher locations. Nonmusicians showed the reverse pattern. No group differences were found on a task that required horizontal-to-horizontal mappings. We suggest that, as a result of learning to read and play keyboard music, pianists acquire vertical-to-horizontal visuomotor mappings that generalize outside the musical context.

Fifty participants who had never learned how to read music completed a questionnaire about their interpretations of standard western musical notation. Sonic common assumptions were that a note must consist of a circle plus a line, symbols with unfilled spaces denote silence, the value of notes and rests increases with the size and number of features of a symbol. pitch is denoted by both note-head and stem, and tempo is determined by horizontal spacing. These assumptions are not consistent with the conventions of standard musical notation, thus the findings of the study suggest that many fundamental aspects of notation are not intuitive to beginners. Implications of the findings are discussed with respect to music pedagogy.

30 flute players (aged 17–31 yrs) performed 6 tasks: (1) reading standard music by sight, (2) reading random music by sight, (3) recall of music notation, (4) recall of letters, (5) eye-performance span (EPS), and (6) choice reaction time (RT) for playing individual notes. Sight-reading ability (SRA) was significantly correlated with EPS and music recall, but not with letter recall. SRA was correlated with choice RT to notes, and there was a significant partial correlation between SRA and EPS, with music-reading ability controlled. Results indicate that increased skill involved both speedup of individual processing stages and an increase in the degree to which these stages operated in parallel.

Attempted to replicate previous findings that pattern recognition skills are associated with sight reading ability and assess whether «auditory» and «prediction» skills are related to sight reading ability. The sight-reading ability of 30 pianists (aged 18–25 yrs) was assessed before being tested in a series of laboratory experiments assumed to involve relatively distinct processing demands. These laboratory tasks measured (I) verbal protocols; (II) the speed of naming individual notes; (III) recall accuracy of briefly presented chords; (IV) the time to make a same/different judgment of 2 repeatedly presented sequences; (V) priming effects in a chord judgment task; (VI) same/different judgments in comparing visual musical notation with an auditory sequence; and (VII) performance in a musical problem-solving task. ANOVAs demonstrated that performance in a number of these tasks was related to sight reading skill. Performance in the visual–auditory comparison task, which tapped ability to generate auditory representations, also correlated strongly. There was a weaker correlation between sight reading skill and prime size effects in the priming task, a task thought to tap prediction ability.

The author, a professional flutist and psychologist, interviewed four pianists noted for their sight-reading abilities. The results of the interviews are considered from several points of view. Sight-reading is analyzed as a problem in pattern recognition: a movement from a sonata by Handel is used to illustrate the principle of scanning for familiar patterns. The close relationship between musical sight-reading and the reading of conventional texts is also suggested. Finally, drawing on the findings of other studies, a cognitive model of musical sight-reading is proposed. The schematic model of interlocking information-processing systems explains the differences between skilled and unskilled sight-readers; it also explains why some experienced, professional musicians are poor sight-readers. Verification of the model is provided in an additional section in which conversations with unskilled sight-readers are reported.

The major aims of the present doctoral dissertation are (1) to analyze students’ music reading skills on the basis of Zoltán Kodály’s philosophy of music education and (2) to develop and test technology-based instruments and procedures to assess music reading skills. To my knowledge, no national or international empirical measurement or analysis procedures on the level of the music reading skills of 10-14 year-old children have been published.