Eye movement in music reading

Eye movement in music reading is the scanning of a musical score by a musician's eyes. This usually occurs as the music is read during performance, although musicians sometimes scan music silently to study it. 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 craft, and a hope that investigating eye movement might help in the development of more effective methods of training musicians' sight reading skills.

A central aspect of music reading is the sequence of alternating saccades and fixations, as it is for most oculomotor tasks. Saccades are the rapid ‘flicks’ that move the eyes from location to location over a music score. Saccades are separated from each other by fixations, during which the eyes are relatively stationary on the page. It is well established that the perception of visual information occurs almost entirely during fixations and that little if any information is picked up during saccades. Fixations comprise about 90% of music reading time, typically averaging 250–400 ms in duration.

Eye movement in music reading is an extremely complex phenomenon that involves a number of unresolved issues in psychology, and which requires intricate experimental conditions to produce meaningful data. Despite some 30 studies in this area over the past 70 years, little is known about the underlying patterns of eye movement in music reading.

Eye movement in music reading may at first appear to be similar to that in 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 the coding system of music nonlinguistic; it involves what is apparently a unique combination of features among human activities: a strict and continuous time constraint 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 difficulty than that in language reading.

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