How Do We Sight-Read Music?
Knowing How Musicians Sight-Read Could Help Music Reading Skills
When musicians sight-read, they are actually doing a combination of very complicated tasks. If a person can understand how sight-reading works, he or she can become a better sight-reader.
Sight-reading is a complex task that many musicians may not completely understand. By learning about how sight-reading works, musicians can understand how to become better at it.
The whole process can be easily divided into three categories: seeing the music, processing the music in the brain, and hearing and interpreting the music that comes out.
Seeing the Music
When musicians sight-read, their eyes move in spurts, not smoothly across the music like many people may assume. The eye actually takes millions of little pictures that it sends to the brain. A good sight-reader’s eyes will stop about four times in a second as it interprets the music for the first time. This allows the eyes to glance ahead at the more difficult passages as they come up while also looking at the music where the musician is actually playing.
Processing the Music in the Brain
For sight-reading to go smoothly, the brain has to process everything coming in. This is why it can be hard for many musicians to read music that is written in an unfamiliar way. It takes them too long to process the different format and the performance will be at a lower standard.
The more a musician practices and plays different music, the more patterns that musician will recognize immediately in the brain. That’s why musicians practice scales, arpeggios and patterns so much. It allows them to program the patterns into the brain ahead of time so that when they occur in music, they can be recalled more easily.
Hearing and Interpreting the Music
The brain and the ear actually work together for the next process. The musician hears the music and sends a message to the brain to interpret. This comes in most when a musician makes a mistake while sight-reading. The musician will use his or her skills to recognize that the notes that came out were not correct. He or she can go back to the missed passage to make a correction later. Without this, the musician could make mistakes over and over and not notice that anything was wrong.
The mechanics of sight-reading are surprisingly complex and musicians need a huge amount of concentration and practice to link all of the parts together. Luckily, most of these functions are automatic. To become better at sight-reading, however, there’s no substitute for practicing!
Sources
McPherson, Gary E. “Factors and Abilities Influencing Sight-reading Skill in Music.”
Journal of Research in Music Education, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 217-231.
Snell, Howard. The Trumpet: Its Practice and Performance A Guide for Students. Thie
Grianagh: Rakeway, 1997.
Learning to sight-read takes practice.
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