Expertise in musical sight reading: A study of pianists

Musical sight reading on the piano represents a complex transcription task involving a series of overlapping perceptual, cognitive and motoric processes. It is suggested that skilled sight reading requires the development of efficient input skills, especially ‘pattern recognition’ skills, ‘prediction’ skills and the ability to generate and use auditory representations. The sight‐reading ability of pianists was assessed before being tested in a series of laboratory experiments assumed to involve relatively distinct processing demands. These laboratory tasks measured (i) verbal protocols as participants previewed a piece of music to be sight read; (ii) the speed of naming individual notes; (iii) recall accuracy of briefly presented chords; (iv) the time to make a same/different judgment of two repeatedly presented sequences; (v) priming effects in a chord judgment task; (vi) same/different judgments in comparing visual musical notation with an auditory sequence; and (vii) performance in a musical problem‐solving task, in which a missing bar from a phrase had to be identified. Analyses of variance conducted on individual experiments demonstrated that performance in a number, though not all, of these tasks was associated with sight‐reading skill. Correlational analyses showed that performance in the pattern‐recognition task requiring immediate recall of rapidly presented chords correlated most strongly with sight‐reading skill. Performance in the visual–auditory comparison task, a task tapping the ability to generate auditory representations, also correlated strongly. There was a weaker statistical correlation between sight‐reading skill and prime size effects in the priming task, a task thought to tap prediction ability. A multiple regression analysis in which performance on the pattern‐recognition tasks was entered first into the analysis, demonstrated that the prediction of sight‐reading skill was improved when performance on the visual–auditory matching task and the priming task were entered on the following two steps. These analyses indicate that the ability to use auditory representations and the development of prediction skills may be important over and above basic pattern‐recognition skills in musical sight reading.