Abstract
We have analysed the basic characteristics of music playback at sight-reading of three two-line classic music selections of varying textures and complexity: a two-voice polyphonic musical piece, a theme and a variation of homophonic-harmonic musical piece. These characteristics serve as objective indicators of the musicians’ skill of sight-reading, and the complexity of musical selection. Applying an original technique of eye movement recording without fixating the head, we studied the eye-hand span i.e. the time from reading the text to music playback. Our findings reveal, that the eye-hand span depends on the texture of the performed musical piece and inversely correlates with the number of errors as well as directly correlates with the rate of stability in the performance. This parameter may serve as an objective measure of the sight-reading ability. It is connected with the complexity of a musical piece and, presumably, characterizes the working memory capacity of musicians.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Russian Foundation of Basic Research (project № 16-06-01082). The authors are thankful to consultant in musicology, associate professor of foreign music Department of the Moscow State Conservatory, Ph.D. in Art History, Filippov A.A., for the help in organization of the research.
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Tereshchenko, L., Boyko, L., Ivanchenko, D., Zadneprovskaya, G., Latanov, A. (2019). Characteristics of Music Playback and Visio-Motor Interaction at Sight-Reading by Pianists Depending on the Specifics of a Musical Piece. In: Eismont, P., Mitrenina, O., Pereltsvaig, A. (eds) Language, Music and Computing. LMAC 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 943. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05594-3_14
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