Eye Movement in Music Reading - Peripheral Visual Input

Peripheral Visual Input

The role of peripheral visual input in language reading remains the subject of much research. Peripheral input in music reading was a particular focus of Truitt et al. (1997). They used the gaze-contingency paradigm to measure the extent of peripheral perception to the right of a fixation. This paradigm—also known as the "moving window technique", involves the spontaneous manipulation of a display in direct response to where the eyes are gazing at any one point of time. Performance was degraded only slightly when four crotchets to the right were presented as the ongoing preview, but significantly when only two crotchets were presented. Under these conditions, peripheral input extended over a little more than a four-beat measure, on average. For the less skilled, useful peripheral perception extended from half a beat up to between two and four beats. For the more skilled, useful peripheral perception extended up to five beats.

Peripheral visual input in music reading is clearly in need of more investigation, particularly now that the moving-window technique has become more accessible to researchers. A case could be made that Western music notation has developed in such a way as to optimise the use of peripheral input in the reading process. Noteheads, stems, beams, barlines and other notational symbols are all sufficiently bold and distinctive to be useful when picked up peripherally, even when at some distance from the fovea. The upcoming pitch contour and prevailing rhythmic values of a musical line can typically be ascertained ahead of foveal perception. For example, a run of continuous semiquavers beamed together by two thick, roughly horizontal beams, will convey potentially valuable information about rhythm and texture, whether to the right on the currently fixated stave, or above, or above or below in a neighbouring stave. The is reason enough to suspect that the peripheral preprocessing of notational information is a factor in fluent music reading, just as it has been found to be the case for language reading. This would be consistent with the findings of Smith (1988) and Kinsler & Carpenter (1995), who reported that the eyes do not fixate on every note in the reading of melodies.