Eye Movement in Music Reading - Musical Complexity

Musical Complexity

Many researchers have been interested in learning whether fixation durations are influenced by the complexity of the music. At least three types of complexity need to be accounted for in music reading: the visual complexity of the musical notation; the complexity of processing visual input into musculoskeletal commands; and the complexity of executing those commands. For example, visual complexity might be in the form of the density of the notational symbols on the page, or of the presence of accidentals, triplet signs, slurs and other expression markings. The complexity of processing visual input into musculoskeletal commands might involve a lack of 'chunkability' or predictability in the music. The complexity of executing musculoskeletal commands might be seen in terms of the demands of fingering and hand position. It is in isolating and accounting for the interplay between these types that the difficulty lies in making sense of musical complexity. For this reason, little useful information has emerged from investigating the relationship between musical complexity and eye movement.

Jacobsen (1941:213) concluded that "the complexity of the reading material influenced the number and the duration of "; where the texture, rhythm, key and accidentals were "more difficult", there was, on average, a slowing of tempo and an increase in both the duration and the number of fixations in his participants. However, performance tempos were uncontrolled in this study, so the data on which this conclusion was based are likely to have been contaminated by the slower tempos that were reported for the reading of the more difficult stimuli. Weaver (1943) claimed that fixation durations—which ranged from 270–530 ms—lengthened when the notation was more compact and/or complex, as Jacobsen had found, but did not disclose whether slower tempos were used. Halverson (1974), who controlled tempo more closely, observed a mild opposite effect. Schmidt's (1981) participants used longer fixation durations in reading easier melodies (consistent with Halverson); Goolsby's (1987) data mildly supported Halverson's finding, but only for skilled readers. He wrote "both Jacobsen and Weaver ... in letting participants select their own tempo found the opposite effect of notational complexity".

On balance, it appears likely that under controlled temporal conditions, denser and more complex music is associated with a higher number of fixations, of shorter mean duration. This might be explained as an attempt by the music-reading process to provide more frequent 'refreshment' of the material being held in working memory, and may compensate for the need to hold more information in working memory.