Tonal and textural influences on musical sight-reading
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Tonal and textural influences on musical sight‑reading Olivia Podolak Lewandowska1 · Mark A. Schmuckler1 Received: 6 June 2018 / Accepted: 15 April 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Two experiments investigated the impact of two structural factors—musical tonality and musical texture—on pianists’ ability to play by sight without prior preparation, known as musical sight-reading. Tonality refers to the cognitive organization of tones around a central reference pitch, whereas texture refers to the organization of music in terms of the simultaneous versus successive onsets of tones as well as the number of hands (unimanual versus bimanual) involved in performance. Both experiments demonstrated that tonality and texture influenced sight-reading. For tonality, both studies found that errors in performance increased for passages with lesser perceived psychological stability (i.e., minor and atonal passages) relative to greater perceived stability (i.e., major passages). For texture, both studies found that errors in performance increased for passages that were more texturally complex, requiring two-handed versus one-handed performance, with some additional evidence that the relative simultaneity of note onsets (primarily simultaneous versus primarily successive) also influenced errors. These experiments are interpreted within a perception–action framework of music performance, highlighting influences of both top-down cognitive factors and bottom-up motoric processes on sight-reading behavior.
Tonal and textural influences on musical sight‑reading On its most general level, musical behavior provides an ideal medium to study the combined effects of perceptual, cognitive, motoric, emotive, and even social psychological processes. Within such a broad framework, music performance provides an especially intriguing window into a host of psychological processes; accordingly, it comes as no surprise that the study of music performance has become one of the fastest growing areas of investigation within the field of music cognition (see Tirovolas & Levitin, 2011, for a review). In this regard, music performance is notable in that it provides the opportunity to study fundamental aspects of human sensorimotor behavior, or basic perception–action relations (Jebb & Pfordresher, 2016; Maes, Leman, Palmer, & Wanderley, 2013; Novembre & Keller, 2014; Pfordresher, 2006). One domain that has been especially prominent in investigations of music performance is that of musical sight-reading (Gabrielsson, 1999; Lehmann * Olivia Podolak Lewandowska [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail Drive, Toronto, ON M1C 1A4, USA
& Ericsson, 1996; Lehmann & Kopiez, 2016; Lehmann & McArthur, 2002; Mishra, 2014a, 2014b; Rayner & Pollatsek, 1997; Sloboda, 1984), which involves performing music from a score with little or no prior practice of that musical notation. According to Gabrielsson (1999), sight-reading involve
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