Eye Movements in a Simple Music Reading Task: A Study of Expert and Novice Musicians

Abstract

This paper reports the eye movements of expert and novice musicians as they performed a simple music-reading task. In this task, subjects were required to report whether two successively presented melodic fragments were the same or different. The tonal and contour structure of the stimuli were systematically manipulated. As expected, the experts performed the task more accurately and rapidly than the novices, especially for tonally simple material. The eye movement data showed that the experts used more fixations than the novices when reading the music for the first time, and the duration of the experts' first fixation on the stimulus was shorter. Although there were clear effects of the tonal structure of the stimuli on the accuracy and reaction time performance of the experts, there were little obvious effects of the tonal structure on the eye movements of the experts the first time the stimuli were read. These results are discussed, and the usefulness of the task to the study of eye movements in music reading is considered.