Survey of Sight-Reading Approaches

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zyxcban G. Wolfs ◽  
Henny P. A. (Els) Boshuizen ◽  
Johan L. H. van Strien
Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’, and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ‘lyric’? These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading, and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects, and capacities.


2013 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 452-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Mishra

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to determine the extent of the overall relationship between previously tested variables and sight-reading. An exhaustive survey of the available research literature was conducted resulting in 92 research studies that reported correlations between sight-reading and another variable. Variables ( n = 597) were grouped by construct (e.g., music aptitude, technical ability) and separate meta-analyses were conducted for each construct. Construct had a variable effect on sight-reading, with improvisational skills, ear-training ability, technical ability, and music knowledge correlating most closely with sight-reading, while attitude and personality were unrelated to sight-reading. Additionally, the study examined differences in effect size by type of publication (published study, unpublished thesis), the experience level of the sight-reader (elementary, secondary, college nonmusician, college musician), sight-reading mode (instrumental sight-reading, sight-singing), and type of sight-reading test. The few differences suggest future investigation of a developmental component to sight-reading is warranted. In general, music constructs that improve with practice correlated more strongly with sight-reading than did stable characteristics. These results support sight-reading being considered a music skill that improves with the musicality of the performer rather than a simple visuo-motor decoding process.


Early Music ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol XXIII (1) ◽  
pp. 124-150
Author(s):  
Donald Greig
Keyword(s):  

2011 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjaana Penttinen ◽  
Erkki Huovinen

In this study the effects of skill development on the eye movements of beginning adult sight-readers were examined, focusing on changes in the allocation of visual attention within metrical units as well as in the processing of larger melodic intervals. The participants were future elementary school teachers, taking part in a 9-month-long music training period. During this period, 15 novice sight-readers’ development was observed in three measurements, with 15 amateur musicians functioning as a comparison group. The novices’ allocation of fixation time within metrical units gradually approached a pattern demonstrated by the amateurs in which increased sensitivity to metrical divisions was evinced by larger average fixation times on the latter halves of bars. Concerning larger melodic skips in otherwise stepwise melodic contexts, an analysis of fixation times suggested that the novices’ visual processing of skips did not proceed in terms of note comparison across the skip but rather through a direct identification of the notational symbols involved. Skill development was seen, then, as increasing fluency of this identification process. These and similar findings may lead to a better understanding of the problems encountered by novice sight-readers and thus to advancements in the pedagogy of music reading.


Author(s):  
Ovidiu Creangă

This chapter tracks the shift in reading approaches to the book of Joshua, from the more traditional criticisms of source and form during the twentieth century to the “new” literary methods that have characterized the transition to the twenty-first century in biblical scholarship. The poetics stance that gradually emerged within the field of Joshua scholarship opened up the book to constructivist as well as deconstructivist readings. The narrative studies mentioned in the chapter exhibit not only remarkable literary depth, but also a strong social and cultural sensitivity that trouble the book’s colonial and androcentric outlook. Using the lens of postmodern spatial theory (“Thirdspace”), the reading of Joshua’s conquest at the end of the chapter decenters the book’s core construction of Israel’s identity around violence, land acquisition, and memorialization of the conquest. The critique “from the margin” gives way to a more compassionate “center.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Pierce ◽  
Tim Hendtlass ◽  
Anthony Bartel ◽  
Clinton J. Woodward

Sight reading skills are widely considered to be crucial for all musicians. However, given that sight reading involves playing sheet music without having seen it before, once an exercise has been completed by a student it can no longer be used as a sight reading exercise for them. In this paper we present a novel evolutionary algorithm for generating musical sight reading exercises in the Western art music tradition. Using models based on expert examples, the algorithm generates material suitable for practice which is both technically appropriate and aesthetically pleasing with respect to an instrument and difficulty level. This overcomes the resource constraint in using traditional practice exercises, which are exhausted quickly by students and teachers due to their limited quantity.


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