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, and sometimes perform from memory without score. 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.