Abstract:
Sight-reading is the ability to play music at sight, without any prior preparation. This is difficult for most musicians - but especially for pianists, who have to read more than one line of music at once. Sight-reading is required in every aspect of a pianist's career, yet it has been neglected in private piano lessons and in music literature. This is perhaps due to a widespread belief that sight-reading is an inborn talent. However, later research found that sight-reading was a mixture of innate and trainable qualities and listed the following as qualities of successful sight-readers: grasping patterns of notes (instead of single notes), reading further ahead, correcting notational misprints according to musical plausibility, responding to structural aspects of notational features, shorter gaze fixations, using auditory imagery, and showing a higher amount of accumulated practice in their domain. Out of these, the most important were: pattern-recognition, auditory imagery and prediction skills. It is important to note that great sight-readers are able to merge some of these techniques rather than relying on a single one. I focussed on pattern-recognition as it was the one that I found most useful in sight-reading, and created a course for my private piano students. Pattern-recognition is when the student is able to, in a sweeping glance, group notes into chunks that make sense as a pattern. Also known as “chunking”, it means one can spot groups of notes quicker instead of reading one note at a time laboriously. To do this, the student must develop a musical vocabulary where they are aware of common patterns such as intervals, chords, scales and arpeggios. Then they must apply it in the context of their pieces and their sight-reading. I recorded a video before their participation in the course, and after they finished the course, and this was given to an external marker who did not know which videos were before the course and which were after. I was pleased to receive higher marks in the after videos, which showed the students had improved after the pattern-recognition course.
