Eye Movement in Music Reading - Reader Skill

Reader Skill

Here, there is no disagreement among the major studies, from Jacobsen (1941) to Smith (1988): skilled readers appear to use more and shorter fixations across all conditions than do the unskilled. Goolsby (1987) found that mean 'progressive' (forward-moving) fixation duration was significantly longer (474 versus 377 ms) and mean saccade length significantly greater for the less skilled. Although Goolsby did not report the total reading durations of his trials, they can be derived from the mean tempos of his 12 skilled and 12 unskilled participants for each of the four stimuli. His data appear to show that the unskilled played at 93.6% of the tempo of the skilled, and that their mean fixation durations were 25.6% longer.

This raises the question as to why skilled readers should distribute more numerous and shorter fixations over a score than the unskilled. Only one plausible explanation appears in the literature. Kinsler & Carpenter (1995) proposed a model for the processing of music notation, based on their data from the reading of rhythm patterns, in which an iconic representation of each fixated image is scanned by a 'processor' and interpreted to a given level of accuracy. The scan ends when this level cannot be reached, its end-point determining the position of the upcoming fixation. The time taken before this decision depends on the complexity of a note, and is presumably shorter for skilled readers, thus promoting more numerous fixations of shorter duration. This model has not been further investigated, and does not explain what advantage there is to using short, numerous fixations. Another possible explanation is that skilled readers maintain a larger eye–hand span and therefore hold a larger amount of information in their working memory; thus, they need to refresh that information more frequently from the music score, and may do so by refixating more frequently.