Eye-Hand Span is not an Indicator of but a Strategy for Proficient Sight-Reading in Piano Performance

Building a mental toolbox: Relationships between strategy choice and sight-singing performance in higher education

Sight-singing is an inescapable component of music training in higher education and is often challenging for students. However, some strategies could help students perform. Yet, the extent to which students can use strategies to improve their sight-singing performance remains unclear. This article asks two questions to fill this gap: (1) Which strategies do students use when sight-singing? (2) Does the application of some types of strategy predict performance? We recruited 56 postsecondary music students and asked them about their musical backgrounds. They then sight-sang a short melody while we recorded their eye movements. After that, we conducted semi-structured retrospective interviews, using eye-movement videos and attention distribution heatmaps to help participants remember the strategies they used. We analyzed the interview transcripts to identify the strategies students used and regrouped them into categories. We extracted seven categories and discovered that using body movements predicted rhythm scores, that using musical knowledge predicted pitch and combined scores, and that relying on automatic skills predicted all dimensions of sight-singing performance. We recommend that aural skills instructors teach strategies explicitly and help students develop robust musical knowledge, as they are required to build strong automatic skills.

Self-Psychological Control and Creativity of Music Creation in Multimusic Environment

This study aimed to solve the difficulties in the research of self-psychology, three executive controls, and creativity in multimusic environment. In today's teaching and performance, the study of piano adaptation has practical significance in broadening artistic vision, improving performance technology, and training symphonic music thinking. A research method of self-psychological three executive controls and creativity generation for creation in multimusic environment is proposed. A computer composition algorithm is based on the hidden Markov model and interactive genetic algorithm. By integrating melody elements and rhythm into the traditional Markov model with only notes or rhythm as the unit, a new hidden Markov music prediction model is established, and the interactive genetic algorithm is used to optimize the music segments. Simulation results show that the algorithm can use a small dataset to quickly create music clips with certain melody logic and in line with users' personality. It is proved that the method based on the hidden Markov model and interactive genetic algorithm can meet the research needs of self-psychological three execution control and creativity generation in multimusic environment.

Review on Eye-Hand Span in Sight-Reading of Music

In a sight-reading task, the position of the eyes on the score is generally further ahead than the note being produced by the instrument. This anticipation allows musicians to identify the upcoming notes and possible difficulties and to plan their gestures accordingly. The eye-hand span (EHS) corresponds to this offset between the eye and the hand and measures the distance or latency between an eye fixation on the score and the production of the note on the instrument. While EHS is mostly quite short, the variation in its size can depend on multiple factors. EHS increases in line with the musician's expertise level, diminishes as a function of the complexity of the score and can vary depending on the context in which it is played. By summarizing the main factors that affect EHS and the methodologies used in this field of study, the present review of the literature highlights the fact that a) to ensure effective sight reading, the EHS must be adaptable and optimized in size (neither too long not too short), with the best sight readers exhibiting a high level of perceptual flexibility in adapting their span to the complexity of the score; b) it is important to interpret EHS in the light of the specificities of the score, given that it varies so much both within and between scores; and c) the flexibility of EHS can be a good indicator of the perceptual and cognitive capacities of musicians, showing that a musician's gaze can be attracted early by a complexity in a still distant part of the score. These various points are discussed in the light of the literature on music-reading expertise. Promising avenues of research using the eye tracking method are proposed in order to further our knowledge of the construction of an expertise that requires multisensory integration.

The association of eye movements and performance accuracy in a novel sight-reading task

The present study investigated how eye movements were associated with performance accuracy during sight-reading. Participants performed a complex span task in which sequences of single quarter note symbols that either enabled chunking or did not enable chunking were presented for subsequent serial recall. In between the presentation of each note, participants sight-read a notated melody on an electric piano in the tempo of 70 bpm. All melodies were unique but contained four types of note pairs: eighth-eighth, eighthquarter, quarter-eighth, quarter-quarter. Analyses revealed that reading with fewer fixations was associated with a more accurate note onset. Fewer fixations might be advantageous for sight-reading as fewer saccades have to be planned and less information has to be integrated. Moreover, the quarter-quarter note pair was read with a larger number of fixations and the eighth-quarter note pair was read with a longer gaze duration. This suggests that when rhythm is processed, additional beats might trigger re-fixations and unconventional rhythmical patterns might trigger longer gazes. Neither recall accuracy nor chunking processes were found to explain additional variance in the eye movement data.