The Eye-Hand Span-An Approach to the Study of Sight Reading

Sight reading is a skill which causes difficulty even to some accomplished musicians. The reasons for this are usually not clear to the introspections of musicians themselves, yet there is some evidence of major perceptual differences among musicians which have nothing to do with visual acuity. A study by Bean (1938) has shown that short fragments of musical text displayed briefly are more accurately recorded by good sight-readers than by poor sight-readers He found that good sight-readers could record five notes accurately in any one fixation whereas poor sight-readers could record only two or three notes with the same degree of accuracy. Whilst this finding is important, in itself it sheds little light on the underlying cognitive processes which are responsible for the apparent superiority of good sight-readers in perceiving musical text.

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