Watch this space: primitive visual cues enhance sight-reading accuracy

The ability to read and perform from notation is a fundamental skill in music performance. While for many musicians, staff notation is both transparent and flexible, a medium that can be used fluently and imaginatively, it is frequently experienced as complex and difficult – as a form of communication it is nobody’s first language. Stenberg and Cross showed that it is possible to make musical notation easier to read at sight; adding white spaces to simple two-part pieces led to improved sight-reading performance compared with conventional staff notation. Separating units of music visually may assist a performer to process a written score, a finding that parallels the results of research into the effects of interword separation in linguistic text, where this has been found to help readers identify word boundaries and process written information, particularly when reading in a second language. The present study extends these findings, using a selection of piano pieces varying in complexity in an adaptive paradigm. Twenty-five pianists with a range of levels of expertise in sight-reading performed at sight from both conventional staff notation and notation that had been modified by adding white spaces to denote musical groups; performances were coded for pitch, rhythm, and meter errors. Results suggest that the modified staff notation reduces error counts by around 19% when performers are nearing the threshold of their sight-reading ability, with a strong correlation between the difficulty of the task and the effect of the added visual cues.