Eye Movement in Music Reading - Conclusions

Conclusions

Both logical inference and evidence in the literature point to the fact that there are three oculomotor imperatives in the task of eye movement in music reading. The first imperative seems obvious: the eyes must maintain a pace across the page that is appropriate to the tempo of the music, and they do this by manipulating the number and durations of fixations, and thereby the scanpath across the score. The second imperative is to provide an appropriate rate of refreshment of the information being stored and processed in working memory by manipulating the number and duration of fixations. This workload appears to be related to tempo, stimulus complexity and stimulus familiarity, and there is strong evidence that the capacity for high workload in relation to these variables is also connected with the skill of the reader. The third imperative is to maintain a span size that is appropriate to the reading conditions. The span must not be so small that there is insufficient time to perceive visual input and process it into musculoskeletal commands; it must not be so large that the capacity of the memory system to store and process information is exceeded. Musicians appear to use oculomotor commands to address all three imperatives simultaneously, which are in effect mapped onto each other in the reading process. Eye movement thus embodies a fluid set of characteristics that are not only intimately engaged in engineering the optimal visual input to the apparatus, but in servicing the process of that information in the memory system.