A reliable and valid tool for measuring visual recognition ability with musical notation
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A reliable and valid tool for measuring visual recognition ability with musical notation Yetta Kwailing Wong 1 & Kelvin F. H. Lui 2 & Alan C.-N. Wong 2
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Recognizing musical notation is an important skill to a full participation of Western classical music, but remains a largely underresearched topic in the psychology of music. One plausible reason of such omission is that, in the past, the research field has heavily relied on self-report of music reading ability, which was subjective and highly variable. This paper presents a reliable and valid tool for objectively measuring individual abilities in visual recognition of musical notation. The visual fluency task measures how fast one can accurately recognize a sequence of musical notation at a desired accuracy level using the adaptive psychometric method QUEST. We checked the reliability of this task in over 200 participants in terms of Guttman’s λ-2 and Cronbach’s alpha. Also, we evaluated the construct validity of this task by considering the convergent validity of this task with multiple external real-world measures of one’s musical training background, with numerous experimental measures of visual tendencies of musical notation recognition and with sight-reading performance. Overall, the visual fluency task achieved satisfactory reliability and validity for measuring abilities in recognizing musical notation. This opens the door for characterizing the cognitive mechanisms, development, and individual differences in musical notation recognition, for understanding music learning and music psychology and for understanding of visual perceptual expertise in general. Keywords Music reading . Perceptual expertise . Psychophysics . Individual differences
Recognizing musical notation is a fundamental ability to learn in formal music training in Western classical music. Efficient reading of music scores is an invaluable asset, if not an essential ability, for any classical musician to develop an extensive repertoire and enjoy collaborative musical activities1. Fluent 1
Note that many great musicians do not read musical notation well, such as the pop musician Paul McCartney and the jazz musician Tony Williams. Also, the majority of the world’s musical activity (in past and present) has been performed by musicians who do not read musical notation.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01461-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Yetta Kwailing Wong [email protected] * Alan C.-N. Wong [email protected] 1
Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Rm 308, Ho Tim Building, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong
2
Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 344 Sino Building, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong
recognition of musical notation is also a prerequisite of music sight-reading, i.e., to play a piece of music when one reads the score for the first time, which is on
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