Musical Notation for the Keyboard: An Examination of Stimulus–Response Compatibility

Abstract

The principles of stimulus-response compatibility were used to provide a performance evaluation of an experimental notation for the keyboard in which pitch varies horizontally in visual space. Subjects performed a choice reaction time task using either the horizontal notation or a more traditional vertical notation. Half the subjects in each notation group were provided white noise and half pitch-varying feedback with responses. Responses were reliably faster with the horizontal display. Further, the superiority of the horizontal display was not dependent on the nature of the feedback. In a second experiment, performance of musicians and nonmusicians was compared using the horizontal and vertical notations. Performance by musicians was equivalent with horizontal and vertical displays and uniformly better than nonmusicians. The findings fail to support the argument that horizontal visual representations will be less useful in musical tasks because they will be incompatible with the mental representation of pitch as varying vertically from ‘low’ to ‘high’.