Visual Information Pianists Use for Efficient Score Reading

When sight-reading music, pianists have to decode a large number of notes and immediately transform them into finger actions. How do they achieve such fast decoding? Pianists may use geometrical features contained in the musical score, such as the distance between notes, to improve their efficiency in reading them. The aim of this study is to investigate the visual information pianists rely on when reading music. We measured the accuracy of the musical score reading of 16 skilled pianists and investigated its relationship with the geometrical features. When a single note was presented, pianists easily read it when it was located within three ledger lines. When two notes with an octave interval were presented, interestingly, their readable range was extended compared to that of the single note. The pianists were also able to recognize the octave interval correctly even if they misread the height (or pitch) of the target notes. These results suggest that the pianists decoded two notes composing an octave interval as a single “two-tone geometric pattern.” Analyzing the characteristics of incorrect responses, we also found that pianists used the geometrical features of the spatial relationship between the note head and the ledger line, and that the cause of the misreading could be categorized into four types: [Type I] Confusion to a neighboring note having the same ledger line configuration; [Type II] Interference from a commonly used height note having the same note name; [Type III] Misunderstanding based on the appearance probability; [Type IV] Combination of the above three. These results all indicate that the pianists' abilities in score reading rely greatly on the correlation between the geometric features and playing action, which the pianists acquired through long-time training.