Eye Movement in Music Reading - Relationship With Eye Movement in Language Reading

Relationship With Eye Movement in Language Reading

Eye movement in music reading may at first appear to be similar to that in language reading, since in both activities the eyes move over the page in fixations and saccades, picking up and processing coded meanings. However, it is here that the obvious similarities end. Not only is the coding system of music nonlinguistic; it involves what is apparently a unique combination of features among human activities: a strict and continuous time constraint on an output that is generated by a continuous stream of coded instructions. Even the reading of language aloud, which, like musical performance involves turning coded information into a musculoskeletal response, is relatively free of temporal constraint—the pulse in reading aloud is a fluid, improvised affair compared with its rigid presence in most Western music. It is this uniquely strict temporal requirement in musical performance that has made the observation of eye movement in music reading fraught with more difficulty than that in language reading.

Another critical difference between reading music and reading language is the role of skill. Most people become reasonably efficient at language reading by adulthood, even though almost all language reading is sight reading. By contrast, some musicians regard themselves as poor sight readers of music even after years of study. Thus, the improvement of music sight reading and the differences between skilled and unskilled readers have always been of prime importance to research into eye movement in music reading, whereas research into eye movement in language reading has been more concerned with the development of a unified psychological model of the reading process. It is therefore unsurprising that most research into eye movement in music reading has aimed to compare the eye movement patterns of the skilled and the unskilled.