Characteristics of musical performance and visual-motor interaction of sight-reading performance of pianists depending on texture of musical pieces

We studied the basic characteristics of the music playback while sight-reading of three two-line musical selections of classic music of different textures and complexity–two-voice polyphonic musical piece, the theme and variation of homophonic-harmonic musical piece. The tempo of play and the number of errors depend on the texture of a musical selection. These characteristics are objective indicators of the skill of sight-reading of musicians, and the complexity of musical selection. Using an original technique of eye movement recording without head fixation we studied eye-hand span–the time from reading the text to music playback. According to our data, eye-hand span is dependent on the texture of the performed musical piece, correlated inversely with the number of errors and directly correlated with the rate of stability in the performance. This parameter is also the objective measure of sight-reading ability, and is connected with the complexity of a musical piece and, presumably characterizes the working memory capacity of musicians.

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